The Heaven of Mercury

Her Remembrance of Awakened Birds

CARS CLACKITY-CLACKING by out on the old highway, tires slapping the tar dividers, always put her to sleep, and Earl, it would wake him up in the middle of the night, he’d have to get up and go in the kitchen, make a pot of coffee and smoke before coming back to bed. His heart racing. The man had to be going all-out even sleeping, when he could sleep. It was all that, killed him. They could say all they wanted about her but it was that what killed him, cigarettes and no rest and womanizing, and work all the time, and just that temper, all pent up and not enough chances to steam it out. She gave him every chance she could and then some, let him rant and rave all he wanted, but it wasn’t enough. The man had plenty of poison in his own glands, keeping that backed up in him for want of putting it into her, but it just wasn’t in her to do that all the time, rutting away like he wanted, and she reckoned he didn’t let it build up too much, with Ann and all the girls at the store as wanton and willing vessels.

The old mockingbird with the nest in the camellia was singing in through the window screen again. She’d had Finus’s radio show on earlier though she missed whatever he’d said about her, he’d said he was going to say something and she’d said not to tell people she was out here about to die, they’d come and wear her out visiting and kill her for sure, and she didn’t want to go that way, with people all around gawking. But when she turned on the radio and heard Finus that bird was out there, cocking his head, and when she turned him off in a little bit sounded like the bird was mocking Finus, singing a waw-waw-waw song made her laugh out loud, it had to be Finus’s old sawing drawl he was after. She wondered sometimes if that crazy bird wasn’t mocking her, nobody knew better than she did how she yammered on, when she was feeling good anyway, when she was on the telephone, talk talk talk, and suddenly in the middle of yapping-on hear that bird trilling some loud funny song didn’t sound like any other bird, and she’d think My lands, that’s me!

Now there he was, bouncing on that little camellia branch and cocking his head in and making some rrrack! rickety sound like a crow.

Out back of the house the old junk cars from her son-in-law’s junklot across the road had accumulated over the years, spreading into her back lot where there was once just the little field laced with honeysuckle and hanging oak boughs and Creasie’s cabin — now fallen in on itself and vines — gathering like the empty husks of giant cicadas, all through the ruined apple orchard. She used to make the best pies of those tart green and brown speckled apples. She couldn’t look out the window on the east side of the house or go in the backyard without seeing all those empty rusted car bodies sitting there. Like a joke on Earl, who had loved the automobile second only to other women.

— I don’t mean anything by that, now, your papa was so good to me and took care of me all these years, and had to live with me to boot, but you know it’s the truth!

Her granddaughter said nothing, but her chin jutted out a little more and she looked away. That Mosby chin, like pictures you see of those old kings and such that inbred so much, though she didn’t think that’d been the case with the Mosbys, just bad luck. They say you’re attracted to yourself in your mate. You’d think they’d not liked the chin so much, though. Ruthie’d had a normal chin, but this child had come down through her Papa’s line. Edsel’s boy Robert had looked more like the Urquharts, before he’d died in the car wreck. He’d be grown now like Laura, here, if he’d lived.

Her granddaughter sighed.

— I’ve got to take Lindy to dance lessons and Chaz to baseball practice, and Dan’s on the road again. I probably won’t be back by today but I can check in around dinner to make sure everything’s okay.

— No, hon, Creasie’s got some peas and greens and we’ll just eat vegetables. I don’t have an appetite, anyway. She coughed dryly into a tissue. -I got some cream in the freezer, maybe I’ll just eat some of that later, to settle my stomach.

— Okay, her granddaughter said with another sigh, and kind of, it seemed to Birdie, huffed in a tired way out of the room.

ONE LATE AFTERNOON at Pappy and Mamaw’s house, she was just about seven years old, she and Lucy’d been sent over to stay with them, and Pappy took her out into his garden. Gardening was his passion, then, and his garden was lush and beautiful. It was dusk. The light faintly blue, and graying. Pappy had taught her the names of the flowering bushes, the pink camellias and wild azaleas with their yellow blooms, his roses and on down the little slope in back the tall sunflowers like Uncle Will would grow himself one day. Pappy knelt down beside her. Little Lucy was in the house asleep. And in the light becoming so faint she was afraid they were disappearing into it, like with the lessening vision they would both just sift into the gray and disappear, so she gripped his empty coat sleeve with her small hand, the thin wool fabric weightless between her fingers where he’d lost his arm in the war. His long white beard and hair looked silver and luminous in the spare light. He covered her hand with his own and said softly, — Listen, Birdie, can you tell it’s something special? She looked at him, afraid. He whispered, — Something has happened. Can you tell?

— Yes, she whispered.

If she held on tight to Pappy she would not disappear without him, he would be with her there, where they went.

Pappy said, — It’s a miracle has happened, Birdie.

She looked at him. In the disappearing light he was becoming darker, a shade lingering here on the earth. Within the soft glow of his beard and hair she could barely see his pale eyes.

Pappy said, — Your mama has given us a new little girl. When you get back to your house you’ll see. And then, as her eyes became used to the darkening light, she could see him, like a child himself, somehow changed.

And that was when Pud had been born. In the last wisp of light from behind the trees they had walked holding hands back into the lamplit house and stood over little Lucy asleep in the middle of Pappy and Mamaw’s bed and looked at her sleeping face.

— Another beautiful child in the world, like little Lucy here, but just a tiny baby, brand-new, Pappy said, and he stroked Birdie’s hair. -In the morning, we’ll all go see her.

She was so happy he had not gone away, the world had not ended in the beautiful moment in the garden, that she began to cry. He held her in his arms, shushing her, and took her into the kitchen, where Mamaw fussed over her and fussed at Pappy for telling her stories and scaring her so. The way he’d point to a plant and say, This here’s hemlock, what they used to do away with their enemies in Shakespeare’s day and so on. I ever get sick and out of my mind, you bring it to me, in a little tea.

Rrraaack! Mockingbird squawking at her again.

— Sing like the songbirds, that’s what you’re supposed to do.

The bird cocked his head.

— Go on!

Ooodle oo! Mocking her again.

Pud was so funny, when they was little girls, once learned the f-word and went around saying it when the grown-ups weren’t there, till one morning when she’d waked up at dawn and was all by herself in the wide-awake world she heard this old crow cawing outside the window, sounded like he was saying fuck! fuck!, and it scared her so she ran into Mama and Papa’s room crying, — I’ll never say it again!

PEOPLE DIDN’T KNOW what she’d lived through in her life — if Finus Bates was to write the truth in her obituary it’d be an outrage. She told him once, said, I have suffered pain, insult, treachery, I guess nothing’ll kill you till the Lord gets set to take you. Finus said, Well some say you’re left here for a purpose, and she said, Well I wish He’d let me know just what that is so I can do it and hurry up and go. And Finus just laughed and said, Well you know I don’t believe such junk anyway. Well I do, she said, or I did, anyway. I don’t know why I’m still here, anymore, I feel so bad.

That Levi. The night Earl had the attack, before he died, Levi was to pick up some five hundred dollars in shoes in Memphis and bring them down to the Mercury store, and they never did get delivered. Already paid for. Birdie was at the Auxiliary weeks later, saw Hettie Martin wearing a pair of their shoes and said, Oh, you’re wearing some of our shoes, and she says, Yes, Levi sold them to me, said he was helping y’all out. But they never saw any of that money, Levi just took advantage of all the confusion and stole them. Then turned around to the executor and said, I know Earl! I know Birdie! Lawyer said I don’t care what you say, Levi, Earl had a son, you are not named in this will. Then the cut-out letters start, they’re going to dig Earl up and do an autopsy, on and on. Oh, it was terrible.

Merry was the worst of the lot in a way but she never really expected any money out of Earl after he’d died. Levi was greedy but with Merry it was more about mischief and mean practical jokes. She got mad at Earl one time and went down to the florist and sent bunches of flowers to this friend and that, in the hospital and here and there, and said just send the bill to Earl Urquhart, my brother. Earl said Goddamn, R.W., I’m not going to pay for that! And R.W. said I know it Earl, I’ll pay for it.

He was the sweetest man, R.W was, and Merry did him so wrong. That time he was laid up in the hospital, and said, Well, one thing I know, Merry’d never cheat on me. Well. He was a good man, and made good money selling insurance, made the million-dollar club every year. But didn’t have a clue. He never did know about the time Mr. Grant who had the appliance store downtown come by one day when Earl was out of town, said to Birdie, — Mrs. Urquhart I hate to talk to you about this but I got to talk to somebody, and I thought it might be better if you told Earl about it. I figure he might know how to handle it, but if I tell him he’d just get mad.

Well she, Merry, had been running around with his partner, Mr. Ethridge, and Mr. Grant says, Mrs. Urquhart, he’s leaving money underneath the carpet there at the store for her, where she can come in and act like she’s browsing — browsing washing machines, now! — and reach down like to scratch her heel and get that money. She’s said if he don’t, she said, I’ll go to your front door and tell your wife what you done.

Not to mention what she did to Finus, all that mess.

— Now, I’m telling you, Birdie told Claudevelyn Peacock, who’d come by early that morning with a chicken and rice casserole and given it to Creasie in the kitchen and come on back to her bedroom, I’m telling you, you may not remember but now Merry was a beautiful woman. She could’ve been a movie star, I mean she really could.

— Oh, I know it, I remember her, she used to scare me the way she’d just look at you, Claudevelyn said, leaning forward with her hands on her flabby knees. She’d done something to her hair, Birdie thought, or maybe hadn’t done anything, or tried and couldn’t, anyway it was standing up like she’d put a little box on her head and slept in it. Had a good color, though, strong salt-and-pepper, her own hadn’t been anything but pure gray since her sixties.

— That’s right, like old Jane Russell, kind of, just a sexpot.

— Oh, yeah, honey, Claudevelyn said. She leaned back in the chair beside the bed and sucked her teeth and looked off like her mind was wandering to something. -Land, yes, she said.

She woke up at some point, Claudevelyn gone.

Earl said one day, I don’t see — she told him about Mr. Ethridge the night after Mr. Grant came by, and he said Why didn’t you tell me sooner? and she said I just couldn’t — but Earl said, I don’t see what people see in her. Well, she was just charming as she could be, kept her hair long and was pretty. But you know what Earl said about her, said her breath smelled terrible, he said I don’t see how anybody could kiss her, her breath smells just like s-h-i-t. And it did. You could walk into the room and you could smell Merry’s breath. Birdie didn’t know why it was and couldn’t see herself how anybody stood it, she couldn’t ever stand to smell bad breath. It comes through your gums and they can be treated. Earl’s breath never did smell like that, he smelled so much like cigarettes. But then he had his own problem, with the stinky feet. She’d been with Earl when he’d be opening new stores and wouldn’t take his shoes off for two or three days, then come home and his feet smelled like, oh, something awful — she’d pick up his shoes and set them outside, she couldn’t stand it. They finally quit smelling that way, but you keep your shoes on for days like that and your feet smell — well you don’t know how bad they can smell.

Well she never thought life would be so full of meanness and disappointment. She hadn’t been prepared for it.

They’d had the best time at night, when she was a little girl. The house had a big room with a fireplace, and they’d all get in a circle around that fireplace. And Uncle Will was an old bachelor, he’d come down, he lived just a hop and a skip down the road, just a garden between, when you looked you saw the big bright yellow faces of sunflowers looking back. He’d come walking down through the sunflower stalks, singing, and she and Lucy and Pud would play tricks on him all afternoon. One time put some water up over the door and it spilled on him. And put pins in the chair cushion, he’d sit on it. He was one of those old grouches, wouldn’t want to laugh: Ain’t you got no better sense than to do things like that? But you could see how he was tickled about it.

The neighbors had an old white horse named George stayed out in the pasture, and when she’d wake up in the morning sometimes she could look out in the field, sun just up, and see George out there and somehow it made her feel good. She couldn’t remember what happened to him, they must have sold him. She took to a baby goat Papa had and went out to the barn with Papa one day and he got angry and had a hammer in his hand and he slung it, didn’t even know the poor thing was standing there, and the little goat just fell over dead. Hit him in the head. They didn’t even dress it out. It wasn’t a pet or anything but it made everybody sad. Once she got up onto George and rode him out into the pasture and he went under a tree and nearly knocked her off. She was always scared of a horse after that. Earl wanted to get all of them a horse. Well he did have one — a beautiful mare — there was a way you’d pull her and she’d rare, and she’d rare up with the kids, and scare her to death. And Earl was going to break that horse. It’s a wonder he didn’t have a stroke over there one day. He got so mad at that horse he led her out into the lake up in the woods behind the house, that horse had to hold her head way up, Earl was just going to drown her. That’s how he was then. Why in the world he didn’t have a stroke right then, his face was so red.

He had a temper like a lion! But he’d get over it.

She could hear a gentle swishing in the trees. Could be rain, coming.

When they’d go out to that lake Edsel and Janie’s little Robert would say, wasn’t but about three, — Su-u-re is a lot of horse grunt around here. A little boy then, now long gone in the car wreck. What was the good in her living so long, when such things happen to young people? It just wasn’t right your children and even grandchildren should die before you. Finus would know about that.

She couldn’t hear. She’d heard thunder last night, oh, it was so loud one time. It’s funny about hearing, the way it goes. She finally got her hearing aid to work right, got it to squeak, but that lady down at the nursing home said she just took hers out, said she’d heard enough already. Earl used to sell that woman shoes, and she never would listen, and he just quit selling to her, he said he’d rather not have her business than to misfit her.

She knew he opened that store down in Tallahassee so he could be with Ann, she knew that.

— Miss Bird?

Old Creasie sticking her black head in the door.

— No, I’m all right, now just go on!

Merry even wrote that book, nobody would publish it, all about the family, and made Birdie out to be someone who pretended to be dumb but was really devious. Well she might have let them think she was dumb, but she wasn’t devious, she just wasn’t going to have all that fussing and fighting, the Urquharts did enough of that among themselves. And Earl knew she knew what was going on. Every now and then he’d come to her crying, You’re the best woman in the world! No woman’d put up with me but you! Things like that. Crying. I’ll never do it again! She didn’t say anything much, but naturally it killed something in you. She loved him but she didn’t respect him too much.

You know the first train that come through up there where Earl was born, where they lived when he was a boy, said it scared him so bad he run in and got under the bed. He used to tell the story. Little boy, he was. He was born in 1899. Maybe they’d all been different if the times had been different. These days nobody thought anything about sex, but back then it wasn’t so common, so maybe those Urquharts were just ahead of their time that way. Except with them it was more like couldn’t think of anything but sex. Peggy one time, she was Levi’s oldest daughter, and she told her mama, Rae, never will forget, she said old Junius Urquhart felt up under her dress. The idea of such a thing, and his own granddaughter, too. And the old man said, Aw, she’s just lying. But Birdie knew now it was true because just about three weeks before Ruthie died she told Birdie and Pud that he did her the same way when she was a little girl. Birdie said, Why didn’t you tell us before now? Said, Ruthie, that’s ruined your life and you hadn’t ever told us anything about it.

Now that old man could have done well by his family if he’d wanted to. He was a good insurance man, but all he cared about was chasing women. One time he put Edsel on his lap and was talking to him, before Edsel knew it big tears was rolling down his grandfather’s face, and Edsel was a sensitive child, you know, and he started crying too before you know it, and he says, What’s wrong, Grampaw? And old Junius says, Son, nothing’s wrong, that has sold me more insurance than anything in the world. That’s what he’d do, you know, in the Depression. Go into people’s houses and when they wouldn’t buy insurance he’d start to cry, say That’s all right, he knew times was tough, he could hardly feed his own family, he never knew when they’d be out on the street, and so on, and they’d buy a little bit. He worked hard, but he wasn’t honest.

My lands they was all bad, Earl too, but she held her head up and acted like she didn’t know a thing in the world because listen she knew that she could not work and make a living, she’d married too young and was spoiled, and she knew Earl would never marry anybody he just slept with, so she let it go. She knew he respected her, in spite of everything. And everybody depended on Earl, everybody looked up to him, never dreamed he’d die as young as he did, just fifty-five years old. And when he died everybody just fell apart. She’d lived almost as long without him as she ever did with him, and got by all right. But Pud’s death like to killed her. And Lucy going like that, on the stairs in her home, and nobody there. And losing Ruthie and Earl and then Robert. Well it wasn’t fair she should have to live through all that, she should have gone before any of them except Earl.

None of the Wells girls turned out well in married life, she guessed, well Pud did but Lucy didn’t. She was so beautiful, Lucy, nothing but a set of big brown eyes in a little birdlike face, and married that silly man couldn’t let go of his mama and then had to just divorce him, and then married that old goat, wasn’t nothing but a servant to him, he wouldn’t take her anywhere. Birdie felt so sorry for her. Pud’s Anton was a good man but he was as crazy as she was, always clacking his teeth out like a cash drawer, the kids just loved it.

There was that mockingbird come back and looking in. If he had any sense he wouldn’t build in the camellia, he’d build in one of the trees in the yard. She loved to climb trees when she was a little girl but once she got up there she’d be too scared to climb down. Never would forget, climbed up in the loft one time and couldn’t get down, and stayed there and worked her stomach till she nearly bled, she was so scared. Always scared of heights but couldn’t help but climb up. Just a birdbrain, she guessed, reason they named her Birdie.

The mockingbird went into his repertoire, so loud it sounded right in her ear.

Sometimes she liked to think she could have poisoned Earl like Levi and Rae said. It was so ridiculous, she liked to think she could have done it. She’d thought she was losing her mind there for a while, would go into the spice cabinet pulling out little spice tins, sniffing, thinking, Did I do something I didn’t even know? She had for a while put boiled sassafras water in his coffee because there was a doctor in Huntsville who’d said it countered the bad effects of tobacco. But she’d stopped because Earl said it tasted so bad. But could it have done some damage before she stopped? It froze her to think so. Levi and Merry had it like some old detective story, like she’d made him scrambled eggs one morning and sprinkled arsenic or — what was it Pappy had in his garden? hemlock — into it, and he’d gobbled it up, gone out and got into the pickup and over to the lake, down to the woodpile to chop some wood, the old mare snuffling up to him wanting some sugar, and fell out, spooking the horse so it ran off across the dam and into the woods. She liked to think sometimes she could have done that, not because she hated him or wanted him to die but just because it’d surprise everybody so, the ones with any sense, who weren’t crazy, it’d be so contrary to their notions about little old Birdie — Merry might have said she was devious but get right down to it she thought she was a birdbrain, too. It’s been so many years since all that, she couldn’t even be sure to tell you the truth herself that maybe she didn’t.

Mockingbird was so loud she couldn’t even see, like she was passing through that song into nothing.

Finus Querulous

THAT MORNING, FINUS had steered his old Chevy pickup into the long driveway, two parallel curving shaded wheelpaths of cracked concrete ruptured here and there by the roots of thick tall oaks, and parked beside the old pumphouse beyond which now leaned the stacked empty carapaces of gutted ancient automobiles. They filled the once grassed little meadow between the house and old Creasie’s cabin at the back edge of Earl’s property. But since his death these discarded wrecks had been hauled here for storage from Birdie’s son-in-law’s junkyard across the side road. It was something probably would have driven Earl Urquhart into a rage, him a man so in love with glamorous cars that he’d bought new every year, always paying cash. He’d had him a nice little estate out here, Finus thought as he helped his old collie, Mike, down from the passenger side and together they walked around the house back into the front yard to the main entrance.

He’d held the railing to the broad covered stoop and climbed the old Mexican tile steps, rung the buzzer. Another car went by out on the old highway, its tires slapping a regular rhythm on the tar dividers. In a minute the door to Birdie’s house opened to reveal Creasie, bent over a little. She looked up at him, then cast a scant eye down at Mike, then stood back and held the door open. -Come on in, she said, shooing them, as if they were both old dogs late for a feeding. -She don’t want no company but I imagine she’ll see you. She said the other day she wanted to talk to you. He passed Creasie and nodded down to her, her appraising eye cast up at him, and he took in her old dress cinched up beneath her baggish bosoms and ending at the SlimJim presence of her scrawny shins. Her feet in dilapidated Keds like tattered skiffs with big dusky bunions thrust out either starboard prow.

— Hello, Creasie, he said, to force a greeting.

— Mr. Finus.

— She in the den?

— She in the back laying down, Creasie said, already headed that way. -I’ll go see if she’s awake.

He followed her as far as the living room and stopped while Mike wearily followed Creasie on back. The room contained, as if sealed there, the chilled stale odor of a neglected museum dedicated to the finer middle-class living room in the 1940s. Heavy furniture with thick and gnarled wooden protrusions like mummified hands at the ends of the armrests, no give he knew to the cushions beneath fabric developing the sheen of old clothing mothballed for years, springs as hard as the springs on the rear axle of his truck. A grand piano at one end of the room gave his peripheral vision the image of a reconstructed stegosaurus. The gas logs in the fireplace, artificial hickory, not fired in twenty years. Then Creasie’s rag head popped into the far doorway and beckoned. He started across the living room, passed Creasie going the other way and listing slightly to one side, drifting back toward her kitchen.

Birdie was more drawn than before and pale, as people whose hearts are failing are, skin seeming thinner and papery, and her pale blue eyes were rheumy, though he could still see in them the innocent mischief that was her nature. She laughed.

— Mike’s already made himself at home.

The old dog had lain down beside the window, and looked with his eyes over at Finus coming in as if to say what kept you?

— You look all right, Birdie. You still look yourself.

This was true if qualified by age and illness. She was puffy with the fluid around her heart. Her hair was long and clean, silver and resting across her shoulder as she sat up against the pillows. Still the small impertinent mouth and gapped teeth. But her eyes were rheumy behind the wire-framed glasses, her hands bent and all spotted up, nails long and yellow, she’d been cared for but couldn’t really care for herself, the details showed.

— I’m not sure I ever wanted just to look myself, she said, and laughed a little.

Her bedroom was pleasant and even fairly cool, though the day was hot, late July. It was at the northeast corner of the house, and there were windows on the north and east walls, and outside the windows there were blooming azaleas, and out in the oak-shaded yard beyond there were dogwoods that in March had been solid white with blossoms, now pale-barked and leafy green. Birds flew from the dogwoods and the oaks nearer the creek at the border of the property and flitted into the azaleas, you could hear them pecking at its mulch below. A mockingbird sat somewhere nearby out of sight but not out of mind, belting a repertoire. Finus liked to imagine the phrases the birds were going through: ohmygodhelpme! ohmygodhelpme! dearme dearme dearme, lookahere! lookahere! boogedieboogedieboogedie, therewego therewego therewego, who, me? who, me? stick close! stick close! stick close! stick close! I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know. Some mornings he woke up and heard the Eurasian collared doves calling, a big Old World bird new to Florida and spreading north fast, their voices hoarse like young roosters crowing, What world is this? What world is this?

The sun lay full-bore upon the north meadow beyond but here broke through the oak boughs only in bright angled blades to the sparse and spotty lawn grass.

— This old house, Birdie said. -I don’t like being out here alone at night, but I don’t reckon I’ll have to be much longer. I mean, Creasie’s here but she just goes back in her room after supper and it’s like being alone. Oh, I tell you, Finus, I feel so weak. I wish I could just go ahead and die.

Finus said nothing and kept his face neutral.

— Tell me again what happened at the home, he said.

— Oh, well, I reckon I died and came back.

— You said that. But, now — you mean all the way out?

— I tell you, Finus, after Pud died, it just like to killed me. It ain’t right. She was ten years younger than me. And then Edsel and Ruthie. She stopped and her face went blank as if she’d forgotten what she was talking about. But she hadn’t. Just at a momentary loss for words. -And I said to myself I’m just not going to stay around any longer, it’s just not right, everybody dying but me. I believe I just started to shut down. She fiddled with a tissue at her nose. She looked up. -Well I believe I died. I was going so peaceful, just like I’d always hoped I would, and it felt so restful, and then something started happening and I woke up with all them standing over me and tubes sticking in me everywhere. Choking — it was awful! I was so mad! And now here I am, just miserable. You tell me what good’s in that. I told them just to go to the devil, I was going home. Laura and Joe said they’d hire a nurse but I told them I didn’t want it, just let Creasie tend to me best she can.

The outburst winded her and she rested a few minutes, breathing hard and deep and slow. -I reckon they think I’m being hardheaded. I don’t want it to be hard on them. But I don’t want some nurse out here pestering me. I just want to go ahead and die.

— Well, Finus said, sitting in the chair beside the bed and lifting his own glasses to rub at his eyes and the skulled skin loose around them, then replacing the glasses to refocus on her. -Sometimes I think that old saying, One foot in the grave, is almost literal, you know. I mean sometimes you feel like you can almost see into it, like there’s a period there when you’re a little of both, the living and the dead. That’s dying.

Birdie just looked at him blankly a moment, and laughed.

— You’re a crazy old coot.

He got her a glass of water from the bathroom tap and she drank from it. Her nails needed cleaning pretty bad. He wanted to go get some tissue and a nail cleaner and take her hand and help her with them, but such tenderness would embarrass her, he knew. He took the glass from her hand when she’d sipped and set it on the little table beside her bed and sat back down. It was true she was left all alone. Her grandchildren took good care of her but you didn’t like to wear out the young, didn’t feel worth it, not if you had Birdie’s temperament anyway.

— I just remembered a dream I had last night, he said to her then.

— Do you believe in dreams? She turned her head on the pillow to look at him.

— Well I think they come from the waking life. People used to think they came from the gods, or God. He waved a hand at the thought.

— I never could remember my dreams, there’d be just a little flicker of it when I woke up, then gone, she said.

— Well this one just now came back to me, because of your telling what happened to you at the home. All right. In this dream I was a young man again, and strong as I could be, it felt fine. And every night — in the dream, I mean — my spirit would go out of my body and fly around the world, seeing all kinds of things. I might go way over to China in the old days, before there were any Western people there, you know. Or I might be in the body of a sea turtle, swimming deep in the Gulf. And while I was gone out of my body I had this dog who would guard it.

— You never had a dog till you got old Mike, did you?

— No, I never had a little dog of my own when I was a boy, Finus said. -I don’t know why. Avis didn’t like dogs, is why I didn’t have one as an adult, I mean older. But I don’t remember why I never had one as a boy. My papa had a dog, some kind of old black-and-white dog. And we were friends, but he wasn’t really my dog. Anyway, I had this dog in the dream, guarding over me lying there, and I can’t remember what he looked like. He was a talking dog, I guess.

Birdie said, — You’re making all this up.

— I was out spriting around and this dog got restless one night and went out wandering, and some people came and found my body and thought me dead and took it off and buried it, so when I came back the next morning I had nowhere to go, and I had to find a body to go back into or my spirit would die. And I looked around and I saw the dog coming home, but when he saw me he ran off, and I saw a horse, but he shied and ran off, too. Then I saw this old, old man lying out in the high grass in the field where the horse stayed. He was so tired he was about to die, and the sun was about to come up over the treeline and so I quick went into his body and was safe. And then I woke up.

Birdie looked at him blankly a moment.

— That’s how I got so old, Finus said.

— Aw, now, you read that somewhere, she said, and laughed. -I know you. Well Finus it’s good to see you, but you know I told you to say on your show that I didn’t want any company. They say it’s all this fluid around my heart that’s making me feel so bad. It’s just so hard to breathe.

Finus nodded. -I thought I’d come out just for a minute, I don’t want to wear you out.

— I guess I look as bad as I feel.

— Naw.

She did look miserable and tired. He couldn’t trouble her anymore.

He stared at her a long while.

— That time at the Potato Ball when you said you wanted me to run away with you, I thought you were serious, she said. -If I’d a been Pud, I’d a made you do it! She laughed again, and coughed.

— Well, he said after a bit, if I’d a been Pud’s Anton, I reckon I would’ve done it, too. But I was a shy boy, kind of. I sure was smitten, that’s true.

— Well, I reckon it wouldn’t have been any crazier than doing what we did do.

— Ha, he said. -I guess that’s the truth.

They looked at each other. He tried to imagine what it would have been like, to have had a whole life with her as his mate. Seemed like something that would’ve had to happen in a separate universe or something. Maybe it had.

— I should’ve done it, Birdie. I should’ve run off with you. I was a coward, I chickened out. It’s the most disappointing thing I ever did in my life. I’m still ashamed of it.

— Aw, now, don’t be, she said, dismissive. -Finus, I tell you, I don’t think I could’ve lived with you. I mean I probably would have, since I lived with Earl and never left him, but I don’t think I’d have been happy with you.

— Why not?

— Well Earl was hot-tempered and he run around on me, and I don’t think you’d have done that, even with Merry, if you’d been married to me. But you’ve always been so gloomy. Even back then. I think I would’ve just lost patience with you, being so glum all the time. One thing you could say about Earl, he had a temper but he wasn’t gloomy. He was cheerful enough.

— Maybe I was gloomy because I didn’t get you. He grinned at her.

— Aw, fiddle, she said. -You were gloomy when we was just boys and girls. I remember I used to tell you to cheer up.

— I don’t remember that.

— Well I did. And you would always say, What’s to be so cheerful about? And I’d say, Well life! Can’t you just appreciate how everything’s so pretty and life can be so much fun?

— And what would I say to that?

— Oh, I don’t know. I don’t remember. I just remember you were a sweet boy, but just as gloomy as you could be. I said one time I think, I’d never marry Finus Bates, he’s so gloomy.

— You didn’t.

— Well, maybe I did. She laughed. -I don’t remember! My lands, that seems like another lifetime, it was so long ago.

— I guess it was, he said.

— Gloomy, just like that! she said, and laughed again. -Now, look, why don’t you stay and eat dinner? I’m not real hungry, myself, and I know Creasie has plenty to eat.

— Listen, I’m not gloomy, I’m just introspective. How can you say we wouldn’t have been a good couple just because I was a little moody?

— Now don’t get upset, she said.

He heard the slappity sound of another car’s tires out on the highway, passing by.

— Say what you want though, Finus, but you are gloomy.

A mockingbird flew up to the window screen with the sound of ruffled skirts being tossed. It perched on the sill, cocked its eye at him. Startled him. He eyed it back. Thought for a moment he recognized something in its hard beady glare. The bird parted its beak as if to speak.

— Shoo, he said, half rising and making a shooing motion with his hands. The bird flew off. Mike lifted his old hoary head from the floor beside the dressing table.

— What was that? Birdie said. -That crazy mockingbird?

Finus looked at her. He’d forgotten for a second just where he was, forgotten she was even in the room.

— What does it matter now, anyway?

— See what I mean?

He caught sight in the corner of his eye now another face, looking round the doorjamb, a faded blue kerchief knotted above the brow.

— You better rest up, Creasie said to Birdie, unless you want to pass on in front of Mr. Finus.

Birdie flicked at her with a hand.

— Mm hmm, Creasie said, retreating. -Dinner be ready directly.

Meaning lunch, of course, and Finus could smell Creasie’s unmatchable cornbread muffins and pots of greens and peas with okra and it made him suddenly hungry enough to stay if anyone asked.

— Stay and eat dinner, now, Birdie said.

He skitched his cheek at Mike to wake him.

— I’ll run on, he said. -No need for you to get dressed. And he leaned over and gave her a kiss on the cheek, her skin soft and malleable as a plucked dove’s, and squeezed her cold thinning hand, and her eyes had already fallen aside in a half-focused gaze of distraction as he showed himself out.

Finus Uxorious

AT THE BRIGHT blurred window there was a shape, and a sound like pecking on glass. Finus reached to the bedside table for his spectacles, put them on, but the shape was just a flitting shadow, gone, maybe just a figment of his now cluttered and wayward imagination. He cast a cautious, sidelong glance at the stuffed chair in the corner of the room: his dead wife Avis was no longer there. She’d been there the night before as he lay in bed waiting for sleep, just sitting there looking at him with the stony gaze of the indignant dead, saying nothing but refusing his silent demands that she go away.

He hadn’t slept too well. Creasie’s call in the afternoon, day before, had set off all his memories about Birdie, now she was gone. -Miss Birdie’s passed on, was all she’d said.

After a moment, he said, — You okay, then?

— Yes, sir. I’m all right.

— I’ll take care of it then. You wait there with her.

— Yes, sir. I ain’t got nowhere else to go.

He had called Parnell Grimes, let him take care of it. No need to go back out, see her like that. He’d have his last memory of her, alive.

He wondered now if he’d have some sort of Birdie vision, now that she was gone.

He lowered his feet from the bed to the floor beside the sleeping head of ancient Mike, scratched the dog’s head, and shuffled into the bathroom. He stood over the toilet and made water, a pretty good stream, better since he’d been taking the saw palmetto. He looked into the mirror, gave himself a little upper body massage. A spry eighty-nine, he suffered the loose skin of the aged, as if it had been removed from someone larger, stretched and dried, then pulled over his old meat and bones like bad taxidermy. There was nothing to do but accept he was very old. He still walked every day, some days did a few half-push-ups and stomach crunches, and he gave up beer, it gave him such gas. Now he drank only bourbon and gin, and that in moderation. He could only be thankful. He easily passed for seventy-something. Most his age were long gone to the boneyard.

In the kitchen he poured himself a cup of coffee from the automatic coffeemaker he’d set to make coffee by itself every morning at four fifty-five. Outside the window over the sink, the courthouse lawn and the tall Confederate monument and the white concrete courthouse itself were just touched with the slanting yellow light cutting over the bluff to the southeast of town. Finus tasted the dark, bitter coffee and touched his fingertips to the window glass, already warm at this hour in late May. He heard clicking old claws and Mike walked stiffly into the kitchen and leaned his head against Finus’s leg, stood there wearily.

— Good old Mike, Finus said. -You still tired? Dreaming them squirrel dreams? Wear you out, old boy.

The dog was fifteen years old, which made him even older than Finus in dog years.

Finus took his coffee to the bedroom and sat on the edge of his bed and let his parts hang over the edge of the mattress. His sac sagged like an old bull’s, and he wore his britches a little low on the hips to make plenty of room for his equipment, whose function now was mostly to get in the way of crossing his legs. Inside his apartment in the Moses Building above the offices of the Comet, he often went naked in the mornings and after evening baths, as clothes were so restrictive and there was too much cinching up of critical parts. He had few visitors, none of them women. The triangular Moses Building wedged itself into the convergence of two streets leading to the civic enclave of the courthouse, its annex containing the sheriff’s department and the food stamps office, an abandoned highrise parking lot that had failed in the seventies, and a row of shops trying in a desperately futile way to help revive downtown in the wake of the mall one mile south. The mall had been failing in its own hapless and inane fashion since its construction, also in the seventies, the decade during which it seemed to Finus that the entire country had seen a failure in terms of morals, economy, politics, and fashion.

At his age he was by some sort of osmosis as venerable in this town as the passing century itself, and was sometimes hailed on the sidewalk: Hey, Mr. Bates! What’s the word, Finus! Slow down, there, Mr. Bates, you’re moving too fast! And such foolishness as that. Finus bathed in it. There was nothing, he had once observed in his obituary for Adolphus William Spinks, a well-loved and longtime mayor, like local fame. It put the national and international variety to shame.

A watering in his saliva glands sent him shuffling to the kitchen for another cup and his daily ration of gin-soaked raisins, an arthritis preventive he thought maybe he’d picked up from Paul Harvey, though he wasn’t sure. For all he knew, they were keeping him alive. He dipped his fingers into the jar and rolled or plucked out exactly nine and dropped them into his mouth, chewing while he rinsed his fingers, and then poured another cup of coffee. If that didn’t keep the arthritis away, he’d help it out with a little Bombay on the rocks later on. Mike lay on the kitchen floor now, and breathed heavily when Finus came in, as if he found all this activity tiresome.

He sipped the coffee on the way back to the bathroom, set the cup down on the sink’s edge, and sat down on the cool toilet seat, which made his pecker draw up like a catalpa worm. He set his feet apart on the cool tiles, hands on his knees like half of a serious discussion, and stared at the blank opposite wall, the nubble of plaster covered by a coat of glossy blue enamel paint. He waited. He ran a hand through through the thick white hair on his head, secure in the knowledge he’d take it to the grave, they were his immortal hairs, always warned Ivyloy to use his Kryptonite scissors on them, didn’t want to dull or break the blade.

— I’ll use the ones you brought back from Mars, Ivyloy once said.

— That’ll do.

Finus detected now the smallest, most insidious of movement. He closed his eyes. What an ungodly business, a man should be afeared like Adam, terrified of this body our garden that contains the seeds of our own demise, slow and cruel deterioration from God’s own image — whatever that was or had been he was sure we were not made in it anymore. Not just the aged. Why did Genesis never once mention shit? Or did it? Finus reached his arm back and flushed, the old toilet roaring like a waterfall. He remembered his first indoor toilet, when they’d moved into town. He’d run down the stairs to see where it all dashed out, looked into all the rooms, expecting disaster, but they were pristine. That had to have changed the mental parameters of the human race, there. No doubt one reason primitives were nomadic was because they so befouled a place they had to move on, but no more — it all just disappeared. Now he pulled off a great pile of tissue to make a wad. Are you a folder or a wadder? he’d once said to a man he didn’t respect. The man hesitated. That’s what I thought, Finus said, and turned away with a dismissing wave. You had to let a man know when he wasn’t acting right. Finus’s friend and physician Orin Heath had once said, — Well Finus, you’ll live as long as a sea tortoise if you can still take a good crap every day.

— That’s my former life, Finus said. I know every inch of the Gulf of Mexico.

— You’re deep all right, said Orin, it’s deep around you, considering the subject.

— I know where the treasure is, down there on the old pirate beach, Finus said.

— I bet you do.

Finus whacked the toilet handle again and stood up. Done and hardly a stink. He took his cup back out to the bedroom, stepped carefully into a pair of boxers, and opened the dresser drawer containing his pants, all cotton khaki slacks cleaned and pressed at the One Hour Martinizing. He pulled on a pair, then selected a white Oxford short-sleeve shirt from the next drawer and angled his longish arms into the sleeves.

So he’d have to write two obits, today. Parnell told him, when he’d called about Birdie, that Midfield Wagner had passed on, too.

He finished dressing, turned off the radio, went into the living room and picked up the phone and called Parnell Grimes at the funeral home for a couple of details about Midfield and Birdie, then coaxed Mike downstairs for a little walk to the courthouse lawn across the street to do his business, then praised him up the steps again. The dog made his way back to the bedroom for a long siesta. In the kitchen Finus filled Mike’s water bowl, shook out a few chunks of food from the sack, then poured himself a third cup of coffee, which he drank standing at the sink. He set the empty cup down in the sink, navigated the stairwell down to the street, and went out into the morning air. He allowed himself a glance at his reflection in the plate-glass windows of Ivyloy’s barbershop, dust motes suspended in the slant rays reaching the chair and around the glass jars of tonic and oil. He’d forgotten to shave or comb his hair and his reflection showed him to look a little seedy. He stopped and took a look, ran his hand over his bristly face and over the top of his head. Maybe he’d stop back in at Ivyloy’s before dinner and get a shave, a nice hot towel on his face. A good way to relax after writing a few things up in the morning.

He remembered the first time he’d seen Birdie. Small child astride a big short-haired dog that carried her slowly down a stretch of narrow beach along a peninsula that jutted into Mobile Bay, following an old spotted gray horse that clopped along in the sand, head down as if pondering. In the afternoon sun they made a picture both forlorn and comical. Where had she been going, a little girl astride a hound and following a downtrodden dray? He hadn’t called out to ask. It was beatific, the way he remembered it now.

His family had been vacationing down in the old Henrietta Hotel on the Alabama coast. The day was bright and clear but blustery. By noon the sky turned gray and low, and soon took on a weird, greenish glow. He stood on the deck with his mother and father and grandfather while they looked at it and murmured to one another about it. By early evening the wind was blowing hard and then sometime in the night he was taken from his bed wrapped in a blanket and put into the back of a wagon with other people from the hotel and they traveled down the old road to the army fort at the end of the peninsula. There they were taken into the huge vaulted munitions rooms deep within the fortress walls where they and the Commandant and a group of soldiers sat around a wood stove, the soldiers and his parents and grandfather drinking coffee and talking while the wind howled. Finus fell asleep again with his head in his mother’s lap in a little brick recess in the wall on which there had been piled soft blankets, and the wind howled him sweetly into dreams he forgot as soon as he woke the next morning.

It was a watery world around the fort, as he could see through still pelting raindrops from the high parapet where his grandfather took him to see. The marsh east of the fort was lapped with little waves, tips of tall sea oats just visible above them and the sky a gray soapy foam. Pines to the south and farther east waist deep in brown water, the clumped tops of the scrub oaks just showing. A group of officers in their ranger hats stood a few feet away from them, looking through binoculars to the east and pointing and talking.

When they went out in the long rowboats to look for survivors in the bar pilot village a few miles east of the fort, his father and grandfather let him go along. He sat beside his grandfather in the prow of the boat in which the Commandant sat with his father in the rear as two soldiers manned the oars. They launched at the marsh’s edge, and rowed between the pines and around the clumps of scrub oak tops, in the lapping brown water and debris from broken limbs and here there the strange item, a floating washtub or wooden ladle, a well bucket, a floating length of swollen rope. An old steel gray and rusted buoy rocked against the side of a high dune as they neared the village. A sopped and pitiful rag doll, face-up and bobbing. Finus wanted to reach for it, but did not. The others seemed to glance at it and look away.

When they reached a place from which they could see the bay out beyond the battered piney dunes the boats slowed for a minute as the Commandant directed them to spread apart and search for survivors. One boat of soldiers headed out into the bay for the other side, where someone had seen something through the binoculars in the far trees. Another struck out farther east, to cut into the sluiced gaps of a flooded tall and broken pine forest, their tops cracked and splayed and gleaming yellow-white wounds luminous in the gray air. The boat with Finus in it turned to go straight inland at the village site, and they had not gone far when there was an exclamation from the Commandant, who stood up in the boat and hailed someone. Finus looked. A man on a ragged grass and sandy knoll stood up and gazed at them as if they were an apparition, and for a moment he seemed one himself, then he raised one arm in silent reply. And then sank to his knees.

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

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

— Where are their houses?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Saviors

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Parnell was astounded and, for a moment, speechless.

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

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

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

He leaned forward and took her hand.

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

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

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

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

— What is it? Parnell whispered in return.

— Parnell, she said, I want to pretend.

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

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

— Pretend I am more beautiful than alive.

When his pounding heart subsided enough to allow it, he held her by the arms and laid her down upon the daybed. She looked at him again in that absent way, then tilted her head back onto the mattress, her mouth parted. She whispered again, — Parnell. And she said something else, too faint to be heard. Hands upon her cheeks, growing cold, he leaned down to her lips. He laid his ear just barely against them. -Parnell, he heard her whisper again, something’s wrong.

He knelt and grasped her by the arms again, and believed he could feel something in her beginning to slow and thicken, heard a gentle rasping deep in her throat. The shadow of her dusky blood crept into tender crescents below her eyes. The delicate fibers in her cornea quivered, and in her dark pupils the tiny reflected image of Parnell’s face seemed to dissipate and disappear.

— Parnell, she whispered, barely audible, save me.

Then she lay still, eyes upon the ceiling. The cottage timbers shuddered in the gusts off the Gulf. Parnell rested his head upon her breast. He could hear the crushing sound as breakers collapsed against the beach. -Parnell, she whispered again, don’t be ashamed. Take me, like you want to do. Parnell began to tremble. He knelt before her on the daybed, and pulled apart her cool and sticky, lovely white legs. In a moment he groaned as heat flushed through him. He gave in and fell upon her. Her breath huffed out as from a cushion, her arms lay rigid at her sides, her head arched away as if in the throes of some horrible death, eyes turned to look unseeing out the Florida windows, lovely mouth opening in dry exhaustion. Parnell crushed his lips to hers, the ripe taste of shrimp still upon them. He squeezed her small and lolling breasts to his chest. And slowly she began to change again, her whisper taking voice again, love literally coming alive beneath him. He heard himself saying her name, his voice deep and crusty as a troll’s, and she responded with a cry that shot into his spine. Blood slammed at the ends of his fingers and toes. He was momentarily blinded. She gripped him with her heels and nails and he felt as if there were no longer any bed beneath them, and a roaring in his ears became their own sobs. She clasped him to her. She knew then, she would tell him one day, that he had unbound her from the tyrannies of grief and fear. Those who would embrace the beautiful dead are most open to the living, have nothing to fear, neither loss nor oblivion. The world was flesh and blood and bone, and through the blessed privilege of sensual touch lay contact with the spiritual world. The air is adrift with what presences are left behind, which find new forms in the living, in those who are most open and alive themselves, not slaves to ignorance and fear. In this world, Parnell had given her that. But in his secret heart Parnell knew, and he would always believe Selena knew, that it was Selena who had saved Parnell.

Selena in Ecstasy

WHEN SHE WAS a child listening to her mother’s sermons she came to realize the possibility of the divine in an ordinary life, this miracle that had occurred with Our Lord Jesus Christ was as much chance and the openness of one’s divine nature to the miracle as it was the big finger of God pointing out he or she. We do not choose God, her mother had boomed from the pulpit over and over. God chooses us. Our choice, she always said, was to be open to God or to close our hearts forever and ever. Her mother was obsessed with death. She always said she couldn’t wait to go to the other side, to be in heaven. Such words had so frightened Selena that her own obsession with death took a hard turn toward salvation and the only way to guarantee that was to be the agent of it herself. She drew pictures of heaven in her first-grade class, and all the angels were her mother. God was a very old man with wild hair that hid his eyes, and a fierce beard that hid his features, and in his hand he held a long-handled scythe. Beside him stood a smaller figure with jet-black hair and a little wand of her own. And who is that? her teacher asked brightly. That’s me. Really? the teacher said brightly as before. Why are you standing next to God, hon? I am standing at the right hand of God the Father Almighty, Maker of Heaven and Earth, Selena said. The Christ Selena, who died for your sins. You’re not dead, though, honey, the teacher said. And Selena hon, it’s the angel of death that carries the scythe, her teacher said. Not God. God is the angel of death, Selena replied. Selena the Christ is the life everlasting. Selena is a very wise child, her teacher wrote home in a note, but with somewhat disturbing notions. Perhaps she has been exposed to ideas which she is not yet equipped to handle.

She did not see God as evil, but indifferent to the kinds of things that so grieved human beings. He was above all that, and so she strove to be more like God in this way, and this made her an aloof child, difficult to reach or decipher emotionally. At twelve she knew from the scriptures it was time to shoulder the burden to which she had opened her infinite heart. It was in the evening, very late, in her bed. She rose to her knees in the moonlight soft on her bedcovers and asked God to take her then and to use her to His ends, and a flood of emotion washed through her as she had not felt in her life to that point. She wept a long time, wept herself into exhaustion, and then it was that the spirit entered her and gained a hold.

There were miracles she performed, in her own quiet way. She could make her teacher call on her for an answer, if she wanted her to. And if she wanted to be passed over, she could control that, too. It was a simple matter of will, and something she did through her eyes, which were large and such a dark brown as to appear almost solid black globes of softened glass. If she wanted into a group of other children who were occupied with something, she approached them and they parted to let her in. And if she was not interested, she was invisible, they never even sensed she was near. She could arrest animals with her eyes, as well, and keep them from approaching or slinking away. Her cat, Rosebud, understood her every mulling thought, and watched her as she would an object of prey, but one beyond her powers to prey upon, and therefore a kind of god. She did not worship, though, being a cat. She expected to be worshiped herself, Rosebud did, and so was always unsatisfied. But when Selena touched her on the top of her head between her ears, she gently closed her eyes and was absolved of her envy and felt content, for a brief while anyway, to be just a cat. Other things she could do were make birds fly from a bush without herself making a sound or a move, turn bad dogs away tails tucked, shut up talkative grown-ups who got on her nerves, and if she really wanted to and it was something she rarely did, knowing it would be an abuse if she did it too often, she could change the weather. But more often she merely willed weather to stay as it was, since she liked most kinds of it, rain and storms as well as sunny days and clear nights. She could make a tree die, if she thought it was a bad tree, though this was rare. She could make other people, the whole town, sleep later in the morning, if she wished. If she was sleepy and didn’t want to get up for school, she could do this, and when she finally dragged herself to the schoolhouse, her father’s old postal bag stuffed with her books slung over her shoulder, the others would be just arriving, too, all sleepy and draggy, including the teachers, who yawned and slurped from cup after cup of coffee, and declared they just couldn’t wake up this morning to save their lives. She could simply slow things down. And sometimes she did. Riding in the backseat of their old black lurching car to church she could tell there were fewer cars on the road, the people inside looking sleepy and tired, and there were fewer people in the church itself, and her mother had to work extra hard at her sermon to keep them awake and responding with Amens and nods of the head that weren’t nod-dings-off. When Selena noticed that, and before the collection plate was passed, she willed them to wake up a little bit, and they would. At home she scaled herself back. For some time she wasn’t sure if she wanted her mother to know her secret or not. She realized she might not be believed, and that her mother might think it a sacrilege that she even would think such a thing.

When her mother fell to her early death Selena at first believed she had been horribly wrong, deluded in her sense of herself, but in prayer that day and following she came to understand she had seen this about to occur, had felt its presence in the hand her mother used to stroke her head as she lay falling asleep in bed in recent evenings. And if she were not some kind of Christ, a notion that had begun to slip from her presence of mind after all in the way that the awareness of breathing slips away from those who have their health, that was okay. It was not necessary to save the world or mankind in order to practice her obsessions.

She knew Parnell to be someone in touch with God, in his own way, a person through whose hands people passed on their way to God. She saw him as an instrument whose own powers he didn’t understand, and therefore an innocent. He was the last person to see her mother in her natural earthly form, before the preparation for burial and the soothing of the living souls. When she held his hand there in the funeral parlor she could first feel its presence and then she could see the divine glow in him as a faint blue aura about his oddly beautiful body. She could see something soulful in him that had come, she knew, from his having been so intimate with so much death. He had his hands on death, and wasn’t afraid. He understood something about it that other people did not. After they married, when people were brought into the funeral home to be embalmed and buried, she absolved them all of all their sins, quietly, to herself. They would all enter heaven, to keep her mother company, and she would send them all with a message, that when her work on earth was done she would join her in paradise.

SHE KNEW OF Parnell’s sickness, something she had divined anyway, through various things he said to her which first implied it and later confirmed it for her in the months of their courtship. When she had first taken his hand in the funeral parlor she had sensed something strong in terms of his relation to the dead, but had not included sexual passion in what she sensed until he told her of the girl who’d been in the farming accident and how she had changed him. A general anxiety had to that point given him such problems he thought they would undermine his chosen career: sweaty palms, a nervous pallor, a popeyed uncertainty in his speech. His father barred him from working the parlors. This continued until one day when the body of a girl in his high school class, mortally wounded in a hay baling accident, was brought from the hospital to the Grimes embalming table — naked, flayed, pale, and cold. Her child’s face mauled by indifferent machinery. It had been a face, Parnell recalled, upon which none of her peers’ eyes had rested in admiration. She’d been as plain, even homely, as a day-old drop biscuit. And now he looked upon her remains (beyond the corruption of his confused imagination, Selena would come to understand), disfigured with slices and gashes from the baler, and he saw beyond them more clearly than anyone had ever been able to see just what her perfection had been, and realized that he loved her and mourned her loss. That day, he began to understand something of his mission, and the experience was liberating. His grief filled him with a bouyant joy, and immediately he arrived at a deeper understanding of all that he’d felt and feared. Later, when they had no such secrets between them, after he had further confessed the nature of these fears, telling her what had happened with the Littleton girl, she comforted him, absolved him. Together they giggled like children over the fact that the messenger of such a mission had been unspeakable lust.

From the time they married and she moved into the second floor of the funeral home with Parnell, this place that had been his lonely habitation since his parents had died when he was only sixteen, when he had taken over the business at that young age and done quite well with it, she had felt more at home than she had since the day her mother died. Her own home, since then, had been such a lonely place, even with her father and brother living there with her. She had felt more comforted by her cat, Rosebud, than she had with her family, though they loved her and she loved them. The cat, Rosebud, had a way of looking at her that was so unguarded, so frankly a look into who she really was and what she felt, that she knew no living human being could match it. And the week she’d been at the Gulf with Parnell on their honeymoon, Rosebud had disappeared, and she knew this was because Rosebud’s role in her life had come to an end. That her life with Parnell in the funeral home would now supplant it in ways she would come to understand. So she grieved for Rosebud, but not unconsolably.

In only that first week she had asked Parnell to let her assist him in the embalming downstairs in the basement. He hesitated only a moment, and then she could see settle into his features the knowledge that this was her destiny as much as it was his own. He gave his regular assistant, Mr. Peach, a two-week vacation, and she worked with him on every body that came to the home during that time. The greater her experience at handling the dead, the greater her desire for communion with them.

It had been entirely a risk, an experiment, that first time she had drifted herself to near-death to be revived by Parnell on their honeymoon. As a child, and soon after her mother’s death, she’d discovered the ability quite on her own. She’d walked away from the house on a cool and overcast day when low gray clouds carried over with a breeze from the front that pushed them. She walked to an old pecan grove a couple of blocks away and lay down in the tall grass that had grown up around them, an old crop of nuts from the now sterile trees knobby on the earth beneath her back and legs. She could see the clouds pass as if through the gnarled and flay-barked limbs and ragged narrow leaves of the pecans. She closed her eyes and pushed herself in her mind toward where her mother had gone. She saw a nebulous blue glow aswirl in the spot just between her closed eyes and put her concentration into it. And passed into it and through it. She felt herself traveling somehow in this direction, not through the limbs of the trees and the billowy clouds above them but beyond them in some other-dimensional way. As if sucked in upon herself the weight of her body seemed released, she herself was weightless. She traveled as if flying in a dream but without the sense of moving through the world, or of there even being a world. Through time, perhaps, but not thinking that, either. And after some time of very swift but relative travel in this way she slowed, something like slowing, or came into herself, what that was she couldn’t say, and seemed to float there, and had the sense she was waiting. Some harmonious and distant, untraceable musical sound. And she began to fill with a kind of happiness. She was content to be just there, and was not disturbed for a time with the expectation of there being anything else. But something began to nudge its way into this state, and gradually she became aware of it as a presence, and something physical in the world, and there was a heaviness on her as well as a warm wetness about her face. She opened her eyes. There sat Rosebud two inches from her eyes, sitting on her chest, licking her face. Rosebud mewed, a question, Mggrrrow? As her sense of being in the world again curled into her body, she roused, petted Rosebud. How did you follow me way down here? she said. Rosebud wound her way around her legs, her tail straight up, stopped and looked up at her words. They walked back home together.

In time, with Parnell, she began to love thinking of the new places and the new ways. At first she had merely lain in their bed waiting for Parnell to come upstairs to find her there, to speak to her as he removed his business clothes, to stop and turn his head slightly toward her when she did not respond, to creep over and touch her here and there. And she was in that state she had somehow perfected, of being there but not there, in her body but out of it too, somehow breathing though her lungs all but still, all but dormant, and she seemed to see him through her closed lids, which in those moments seemed to her as thin a membrane as the protective covering on the eye of a fish, she could see right through them, the image before her pulsing almost imperceptibly behind the tiny, spidery veins.

But this gave way soon enough to other places. The supply closet off the main hallway. In a plush chair in one of the parlors, Parnell having to pull her lifeless body from the chair onto the carpeted floor. Collapsed into a heap on the kitchen floor, half a sandwich left on her plate at the table. Once, in the little hedged bit of private yard they kept behind the home. And finally on the preparation table itself, surprising Parnell there as he came in tugging on a pair of surgical gloves, only a miracle he hadn’t brought a policeman or distant relative of the deceased in there, of the one who lay under the sheet just feet away from Selena’s supine, naked, chilled but latently vital form.

They rarely went through the long elaborate playing out of the game, after the honeymoon, as it was Parnell’s genuine fear that had led to it that time, and he was no real actor, Parnell. Which is not to say he had no imagination. For when he stood over her and she didn’t respond, though he knew she was only playing again, his imagination soon took him to the time and place when this would be no game, when he would be speaking to a Selena who would never respond, and it filled him again with the old grief and lust.

This was her understanding, and she understood Parnell. She understood perhaps better than Parnell himself his attraction to the dead. She had known the first time she looked into his eyes that he was less fearful around the dead than around the living. What threat the living presented to him she wasn’t quite sure, at the time, but she came to understand even that. It was that he and the dead shared the same secret, which was that the fearful illusion of mortality — and immortality, as well — is lifted like a veil to reveal something simpler and more profound, without fear. Only the dead see one another, and themselves, for what they truly were, or are. The terrifying idea of time did not apply at all.

What was it, the evening she went on her way, not to return? Parnell had stepped outside to get something he’d left in the car. She had stepped out of her dress and was walking about upstairs in her slip, barefoot, cooling off. She went into the bathroom, the soles of her feet cool on the bare blue tiles there. It felt so good. She lay down, the coolness of the tiles pressing through the silky thin material of the slip. She placed the palms of her hands down on them, too, pressed the back of her neck against them. It felt wonderful. A breeze from the ceiling fan in the hallway wafted in and over her, lifting a tuck of the slip from one of her knees. She knew Parnell would be up in a second, and she couldn’t resist letting herself go. She closed her eyes, she found the blue swirling light in the darkness in the center of her forehead. She drifted deliciously. Delicious the last thought of that peace and of the stirring excitement of finding him on her, in her, as she came back to the world. She was weightless and moving swiftly toward the place of stillness. There she lay, in a kind of heaven, while in another, heavier, more burdensome world her love made his way to and from the drugstore to retrieve the package he’d thought he’d left in the car, to where the body of his beloved Selena awaited him, serene and beautiful in her slight undergarments, her lovely feet bare and clean, her palms down on the blue tile floor.

Finus Homerus

AN EMPTY STOMACH always sharpened his sadness. He leaned himself on down the sidewalk in the brimming morning, light like a bubble to the range of his vision in the air. So stunning now he stopped, to take it all in. Mercury lay nestled into the vale below the piney ridge to the south. It was the ridge over which the 1906 cyclone had skipped and fallen down onto Front Street, blasting to splinters and rubble what had been built since Sherman’s March, when the town’s first buildings had all been burned to the ground. After the cyclone the town had been rebuilt again with brick and stone into a thriving city in the twenties, its apogee, after which the railroad industry had abandoned it for Birmingham, where there was steel. Never enough gumption and guts in this town to sustain much strength. Throughout the century it hung on by its fingernails. And now downtown lay in a gauzy summer morning haze, and somehow its sleepy survival filled Finus with a kind of saddened joy.

There had been lately some occasional things envisioned, rare but distinctive, so that he had to wonder if he wasn’t himself walking along so close to the edge of another dimension, like a man half in the mirror, half out. The week before, he’d been standing there in the Comet office talking to Maxine Thornton, a big redhead who’d been a real looker in her day, Miss Mercury and all, even though she was on the heavy side, went all the way to the state beauty pageant, and all on account of having a most beautiful, ICBM bustline. She lost at state, came home, went to work in the chamber of commerce office, took on a walking regimen, marching around town in the hours between dawn and the start of the working day, gradually diminished in size to something like petite. But the boobs were a casualty of her fitness plan, much to the chagrin of old farts who liked to watch her flapping along in pink walking togs. So, standing in his office talking to Maxine Thornton, his assistant Lovie out to lunch, Finus was listening to Maxine talk about an ad for the upcoming Business Fair when she pulled out her left bosom and held it cradled there in her hand, big brown nipple bold as an eyeball staring right at him. Finus snatched off his glasses, closed his bad eye, no boob. -Well, what? Maxine said, coylike. Finus told Ivyloy about it later on, still in a daze.

— Well, I liked her better heavy, myself, Ivyloy said. -Now that’d been a bozoom.

HE MADE HIS way to the Dreyfus Building, watched his reflection in the polished gold doors of the old elevator, rode it to the fifteenth floor, nodded his hello to Floyd, the sleepy engineer, settled in. Played “The Star Spangled Banner” to help wake everybody up.

— Good morning in the a.m., each and every one of you, and it’s a fine morning, if a little sad by my lights.

— Midfield Wagner, farmer and carpenter, passed on last night. I’ll tell you a little about old Midfield, wasn’t really all that old. And Birdie Wells Urquhart. One of my oldest and closest friends. Companion. I need to spend a little time talking about Birdie, if y’all don’t mind.

First he would tell about Midfield, in order to (though he wouldn’t say so) get it out of the way. He would tell about Midfield’s life. Twenty-two years at the Steam Feed Works, twenty before that with the telephone company, Named Midfield because of where he was born, while his mama was out picking ears of Silver Queen. Raised on the farm the family lost in the Depression. Started out stringing wire from here to India Beach while they were still digging the Intracoastal Waterway down on the coast. Caught malaria when he was only twenty-five, camping out in the swamps and digging pole holes, and recovered from it though many had died. He lived to suffer a stroke last night while out back feeding his dogs.

He said when and where the services would be, moved on to other business, news items about the day. He was saving Birdie for last.

He told about some of the high points of her life, including physical ailments she overcame such as colon polyps and gallstones in her forties, hysterectomy somewhere along in there, thought she was going to die of infection, didn’t. Told about being widowed at fifty-four, living the rest of her life in that condition. Didn’t go into the unpleasantness with Earl’s family. He wound around back to her early years. He told the story of how he first met her, down in the little fishing village where she lived before her family moved to Mercury, the village wiped out in a hurricane, the same one that would move inland and spawn the tornado that wiped out most of Front Street in Mercury, 1906. How she made a life up here after that. How the vision of her as he’d known her young was what endured, for him.

He’d talked for two hours, mostly about her. Floyd the engineer tapped on the glass. Finus looked up, nodded, signed off. Took the elevator down and walked back into the air, onto the street, the morning traffic chuffing by, idling at lights. Amazing, he was still somehow alive.

And Finus, because he was ravenous now, thought he’d stop at Schoenhof’s and treat himself to a rare breakfast of biscuits, bacon, and eggs before going in to work at the Comet.

HE MADE HIS way down past the two remaining banks, Citizens and Peoples, past the Feinberg’s fading clothing store, and into Schoenhof’s. Shorty hailed him from behind the counter and he took a stool, leaned backwards for a moment to check out the back room where just one couple sat drinking coffee beside the stuffed mule in the corner. The mule belonged to the original owner. Was said to have been sired by him with the old mare he lived with until his wife could join him from Arkansas. Said it looked like his wife. Well that don’t make sense. I know it. He ordered two eggs over medium with grits, whole wheat toast, and just two slices of streak-o-lean as Shorty stood with his square head — trimmed in a piece of Ivyloy’s most serious work, skin-tight on the sides and bristly black on top — thrown back, gazing at the ceiling. Then Shorty jerked into action.

— I got your eggs over medium, freshest eggs to ever touch a tooth, and here’s some hot coffee. He plunked a steaming cup before Finus and disappeared through the swinging doors to the kitchen. In five minutes he was back with a hot plate and clattered it down.

— See you got to write two today, Mr. Bates, he said.

Finus nodded. -Miss Birdie, he said.

— A fine woman, Shorty said with a grim snap of his head. -I remember Mr. Earl, used to come in here every morning before opening up his store. Hell of a gentleman. Finus nodded, studying his glistening eggs. Shorty shook out the white linen napkin he carried at all times and folded it back over his arm. -Hello, Mr. Mayor! he sang out then, and in a second Pearly Millens took the stool next to Finus.

— Morning, Finus said.

— Finus.

Shorty slid a cup of coffee before the mayor, who nodded, waved off anything else. Pearly brought the cup to his broad, red mouth, his flabby lips divining the steaming coffee like a horse’s lips seeking sugar in a palm, though his winged eyebrows, bony hooked nose, and bald head made him look more like a plucked owl. Finus turned his attention to his breakfast. He pricked the eggs with the tine of his fork and watched orange yolk trickle out onto the white. He cut a piece of the white and dipped it into the yolk and ate it with a bite of bacon and a bite of toast. Its deliciousness spread through him. He was lost in it for a long moment, eyes watering.

— What you into today? Pearly said.

— Not much, Finus said. -Got to write Birdie Urquhart’s obituary. She was my childhood sweetheart.

— So I heard you say on the radio this morning, Pearly said. -I didn’t know her too well, myself. Now I knew her son, Edsel. Did he die?

Finus nodded. -Down in Laurel. Bad heart, like his papa.

— I remember his papa Mr. Earl, now, Pearly said. -Sort of a distinguished old fellow.

Finus snorted. -Old. Didn’t live to be but fifty-five.

Pearly looked at him in astonishment, himself being sixty-two.

— Time does move on, he said after a moment.

Finus grunted, sipped his coffee.

— Rumor had it, as I recall, she did old Earl in herself, way back then, some kind of poison or something, Pearly murmured, sipping his own.

Finus slowly turned on his stool and stared at Pearly.

— Say what, now?

— I didn’t say it, I said people said it, back then. He looked sideways at Finus, then dropped his pop eyes back down to the coffee cup, mumbled, — Anything to it?

Finus glared at him a moment longer, then ate in near-silence, the light clattering of his fork against china, the gentle slurp of Pearly at his coffee. He swiped the plate with a wedge of toast, washed it down.

Pearly said, — Did they do an autopsy on him, then, on Mr. Earl?

Finus took up his napkin, wiped his lips hard, tossed it onto the counter next to his plate.

— Politicians can’t afford to be rumor mongers, Pearly, he said then, pulling out a five and dropping it onto the napkin. -Your realities are sordid enough. Mind your own business. Or the town’s, for a change.

Pearly looked back at him, winged eyebrows in flight.

— I’m going on, Finus said. -See you at the council meeting tomorrow night.

— You can skip this one, Pearly said.

— That’s when you’d pass a pay raise, Finus said, and walked out.

At the Comet building he opened the door and went on in. Lovie was there with the Mr. Coffee gurgling, typing the community columns. With her big pink ears she looked like a silver-haired elf.

— Who you got, Lovie?

— Spider Creek, she said in her hoarse quaver. She didn’t look up, focused on the computer screen. She’d wanted a computer since 1985 but Finus hadn’t given in until last year.

— What’s on Mrs. Chambliss’s mind?

— She’s down in the back and did all her snooping by phone this week. It’s a long one.

— She knows I cut her off at twenty-one inches.

— I guess we’ll see about that.

— I’m not giving in again. Twenty-one inches of Spider Creek is about all we need.

— I guess we’ll see.

The newspaper’s office was one large room that had been a tack and hardware store on the west edge of town in the early 1900s. The old press was in the back room, looking like some complex medieval torture machine for removing the bones by stages and flattening the body into figures for a ghastly tapestry.

He sat down in his own old wooden swivel armchair and made a couple of phone calls, then faced the heavy Underwood desktop manual he’d used since 1935, inserted a clean sheet of paper, and whacked out an obit on Midfield.

MIDFIELD WAGNER, 68

He once took two of his laying hens to the top of a water tower to show his boys that they could fly a little bit, but instead of gliding to the ground as expected the hens, apparently inspired by the view, caught a thermal and floated all the way across the creek into Claxton Swamp and were never seen again. Now wild, mischievous chickens are among the most mysterious of creatures in that low tangly stinking place, and their presence is suspected of being the resource fueling the resurgence of the swamp’s alligator population.

He worked twenty-two years at the Steam Feed Works and could do any job in the foundry, from casting to repairing machinery, spent twenty years before that with the telephone company, and in spite of what some say about his lifestyle he never missed a day of work with either concern in all that time except for one week when what we’d now call a microburst blew his barn down in 1976 and he reconstructed the whole thing from broken timbers and splayed lumber and bent tin, so that the result looked like the same barn been out on a three-day drunk, and some said that was fitting, anyway.

Although not a churchgoer himself he helped construct out of the kindness of his heart every one of the seven churches built in this area between 1963 and 1987. His wife was a Pentecostal but a gentle one, and he never succumbed, himself, to that spirit.

Midfield Wagner of Booker’s Creek Community died Sunday night about 9:30 as he was feeding his dogs in the pen out back of his house, or at least that’s when he had what was apparently a heart attack and fell down in the pen. He went out back with the dog food, his wife Althena heard the tinkling of the pellets into their pails, and then a funny sound. She went out there and that’s when she found him, the dogs kind of looking back and forth between him and the food in their pails.

He had been despondent for some time following the death of their older son and the boy’s two preschool children in an automobile accident on 45 South, headed to the beach for vacation. He was 68.

Midfield was raised in Booker’s Creek and served in the Air Force during the Korean War as an aircraft engine mechanic. He worked on P-51 Mustangs, which most people don’t know carried at least as much of the load in that conflict as the famed Sabre Jet.

When he returned home after the war he married Althena “Al” Curry and after a honeymoon at the Gulf they settled into a mobile home back on his parents’ property. When his dad passed away they moved into the old farmhouse with his mother, and she died in 1971. Midfield will be buried beside his parents in the oak grove on their property, beside the creek.

He farmed some ten acres of the land on his family place and kept cows on the other 40, and his wife said he’d planned to give up the cows and plant pine seedlings, which she may do now that he’s gone.

Visitation and service will be at Grimes Funeral Home, the service starting at 3:00 Wednesday, and proceeding afterwards to Magnolia Cemetery. Honorary pallbearers are the workers in the works foundry. Pallbearers are James Troy, Lucky Williamson, Egstrom Anderson, Ralph Svoboda, Ted Melancon, and Barclay Teague.

Finus rolled the sheet out of the Underwood and underlined a couple of things he wasn’t sure of in pencil. He made some calls, to Midfield’s relatives and friends, made a couple of corrections, and laid the obit in the copy box on the corner of his desk, on top of the three others he’d written since Friday for Wednesday’s edition.

He looked up. Lovie was standing next to his desk, looking through her bifocals at the pages he’d done.

— Ha, she said, that chicken story. Jeepers, I remember my ma used to wring a chicken’s neck, just like that.

She made a little flick of her slim speckled wrist.

— Say that was in Indiana, Lovie?

She looked at him a second, mouth cocked.

— Michigan.

— Oh, yeah.

Jeepers, she’d said, one of her words. Rubbing his stubble, Finus considered Lovie, her fading Michigan twang now warbled into some kind of new American generic fostered by television and a misplaced embarrassment over accents in general, a psychological and self-imposed diaspora of the regional self.

— I’ve still got to write up Birdie, he said.

— Ah, poor thing.

She’d come down, Lovie had, in tow with her retiring husband in ’78. He was a salesman of nuts, the metal kind, nuts and bolts, a fisherman whose prize catches on their weekend trips to the coast she still displayed on her desk in the pastels of washed-out Polaroids. Why had they stopped here, in Mercury? Something to do with a cousin or elderly aunt, he thought he recalled. He favored one photo, with Lovie hoisting a huge red snapper, a little strip of flesh showing between her shorts and tied-up shirttail, her browned and more youthful feet beside a line of two-to-four-pounders laid out in the sand, invisible tiny fishteeth bared to the hostile air at her toes. He could have loved her, then. Anyone could’ve. His tender expression seemed to puzzle her, though.

— What? she said.

— You inspire me, Lovie.

— And just what does that mean? her voice querulous as a parrot’s.

Finus just looked at her, smiling. She gave him her admonishing look and half-hobbled back over to her computer and began tappity-tapping the keys.

Finus bent again to his more formidable machine.

BIRDIE WELLS URQUHART, 88

She was born in a little fishing village on the Alabama Gulf coast, but moved here with her family after the storm of 1906 wiped out most of the homes, and most of the people there, too.

Her favorite story about herself was that she once threw a shoe at her sister Pud to make Pud stop snoring. Funny she’d marry a man who threw shoes out his shoe store at fleeing women who’d argued with him about their shoe size. The shoes he (her husband, Earl) threw were the size the women wanted: too small. Say all you want, good or bad, about Earl Urquhart, but Birdie never wore a shoe that wasn’t right for her foot, nor any customer at the Vanity Boot Shop, either.

Along with her two sisters, she once drove three hundred miles in a day chasing Earl from town to town as he made business calls, just missing him, and then got in trouble with him later because there wasn’t any supper ready when he got home — just ahead of them. They hadn’t wanted him for any special reason. Just a whim that got out of hand.

Berthalyn (“Birdie”) Isabella Wells Urquhart died Sunday at home in her bed of apparent heart failure. She was 88. She was born on the Gulf coast and grew up in Mercury, married Earl Urquhart when she was sixteen years old and raised two children who died before she could, having lived thirty-something years a widow.

Birdie was much loved in this community and for many years helped out as a Pink Lady at the hospitals. The Pink Ladies, mostly retired housewives, wore pink outfits and helped to comfort the sick and dying. She was a good storyteller, professing ignorance but possessed of a great deal of wisdom born of long experience. Though she lived out the second half of her life in relative peace and quiet, her years with the Urquhart family after her husband’s death in 1955 were somewhat tumultuous, the subject of much local gossip. She once said she guessed the only way to finally get along with your in-laws is to outlive them. Which she did.

Survivors include two grandchildren, five great-grandchildren, several nieces and nephews, and many many good friends and admirers.

Scratching his beard stubble he pulled the obit from the platen and read it over, thinking. He knew he wouldn’t stop at that. Pretty dull. If he’d been a poet, maybe, he could have written a poem and said what was in his memory concerning her. A brief epic. If he were a novelist he could tell her story. But he was an old man with a rambling imagination, a spotty if distinct memory. He wandered over to Lovie’s desk where she clickety-clacked away, picked up the raw copy of the Spider Creek News, drew a line in pencil about where he figured twenty-one inches would stop, and put it back down on Lovie’s desk.

— That’s all, he said to Lovie, cut it there.

If not Johnette Chambliss could go on for columns with the running diary of her amazingly mundane week. Went to see my sister over in Bay Springs, she was having a time with her new washing machine, which was whirling catywampus, enjoyed our visit very much. The girls choir sang in the church Sunday morning, they sang three hymns including my favorite, we enjoyed the services very much as well. The drive home was really beautiful, the Lord had spread his grace upon the countryside, and we enjoyed the drive home through its splendor very much. I was down in the back, but managed to get Shelley Jean to drive me to see Coretta Mayfield who has been suffering so with her spider bite. Ankle still swole up big as a man’s neck and all purple like. But she was in good spirits, and served us coffee and a delicious angelfood cake from IGA and we ended up enjoying our visit very much and it seemed like Coretta did, too. There wasn’t a thing in the world Johnette and her sister or daughter or semi-comatose husband Fleck didn’t enjoy very much, be it the simple pleasures of rocking on the porch or sitting around the space heater drinking coffee and gossiping, commiserating with others ailing or lame, or the sublime pleasure of laying somebody to rest, for that grief given lip service and noted in tones reverent enough it was on to the food laid out later and to the passel of flowers bunched around the grave which were quite beautiful and the words said over the corpse plowed satinly into its coffin and maybe even a brief hymn sung by the mourners around the tent, which was beautiful and which we all enjoyed it all very much. For no doubt not to enjoy anything on God’s earth ultimately would be an affront to the Lord, cast confusion across the waters and among the peaks. Why yes Johnette we enjoyed your article this week very much.

He went back to his desk and put another sheet in the Underwood and started in.

But to take another angle. Or addendum:

She was a woman to whom nothing much happened in life except that she got married (too young), was widowed (at fifty-four, too young), had a couple of children who died (not young, but before her, so too young there too), who spent some thirty-five years of widowhood doing a little charity work but mostly just helping out with grandchildren, doing a little canning, making an astonishingly sweet and delicious tub of homemade ice cream, and visiting her two sisters until they died (at good old ages, though Pud went a little too young, and both too young by Birdie’s lights, as she was the oldest of the three). Whose sole aberration in the long line of her life should not have been her mean-as-snakes, crazy-as-loons in-laws accusing her of poisoning her husband, harassing her with missives collaged of cut-out letters from trashy magazines, which threatened among other things to have her deceased husband exhumed for an autopsy.

Imagine this for yourself. You marry a strong-willed man mostly because he is so strong-willed you can’t resist. You live nearly forty years with him, bear him two children, bear his somewhat difficult ways, make him a home, put up with his somewhat insane family, only to have him die on you before the age of sixty, and then these insane in-laws descend upon you with vengeance born of their not receiving any money from your husband in his will, and accuse you of murdering the man — for which reasons it is never really made clear, for which motive is never established by anyone, for which advantage does not exist. One such cut out letter says, Someone we know has murdered someone — POISON — and made it look like a natural death. Beware. THE TRUTH WILL OUT.

Imagine it in letters of motley colors, odd sizes.

Many of us old-timers know all about that business. But let us set the record straight. The story survives in this case because the charges were absurd, groundless — just as it would survive if it were true because of its truth — and were never taken seriously by the legal authorities, including the coroner at that time, as now, a then-youthful Parnell Grimes. And no one else ever took them seriously, either, not Miss Birdie’s in-laws who made them, not the old sick folks in the hospital who would joke with her when she came by as a Pink Lady, saying, — You ain’t going to p’ison me, now, are ye? and laugh like the wheezing geezers they were. She’d laugh right with them. And it was only out of her complete lack of desire for any sort of vengeance and great desire only for peace and quiet that Miss Birdie did not have her in-laws charged with slander.

There were many things that could not be said publicly and certainly not written about this odd and unfortunate moment in the long life of Birdie Wells Urquhart, but now that she is gone, and now that I am old enough not to care, things can be said. Because unlike her I don’t give a nether hoot about what other people think, including any descendants of the Urquharts.

He yanked the page out of the typewriter and slapped it facedown in his tray.

— Well what’s got into your craw? he heard Lovie say from her computer, eyes on the screen.

— I can’t get a handle on it just yet. Think I’ll walk over to Ivyloy’s for a shave.

— You could use one, Lovie said.

He looked at her a long moment, coming back to himself.

— Did you get breakfast, Lovie? Want me to pick you up a bite to eat?

Lovie patted a crinkled lump of foil on the desk beside her machine.

— I brought a sandwich, she said.

— What kind?

— Beg your pardon?

— What kind of sandwich.

She looked up at him with an expression as if he’d asked her the color of her dead husband’s eyes.

— Turkey, she said finally.

Finus considered this as if she’d said something of grave import.

— All right.

— You’re a queer one, she muttered to herself just loud enough for him to hear as he went out the door.

Through the Mockingbird

IN THE MOMENT just the other side of the mockingbird she drifted down the trail through the woods to the low and damp place where the little cabins sat like crooked tales of those who had once lived there in their way.

She knew she was in the ravine, a place she’d never seen except from the lip of it, and far back from that, from the car. It’d been like a hades the edge of which she was too scared to approach. Here was a little, old old house, a little bitty frame house with faded green shutters and porch that leaned away and down and had two old green wooden rockers on it.

I like green, Creasie said. Then she said, Nobody much lives down here anymore.

Inside the walls were papered with the funnies and looking close she could see one date was July 27, 1947—that would have been her funnies. So every Sunday paper Creasie took home ended up here on the walls, she thought some of them might have ended up in the outhouse. Maybe so. There was no natural color left to the funnies on the wall, they just glowed with their color again when she drew close to see them. Get out of my sight! Mr. Jiggs cried to his frumpy wife, Maggie. Oh, she used to like that one.

She said, I want you to forgive me, Creasie.

Creasie stood looking confused near the cabin’s door, her arms at her side, a look like a blind woman’s on her face, seeing nothing.

What for, Miss Birdie?

Well, I don’t know. I done the best for you I could. I guess for being white, and you black.

Nobody couldn’t help that, Creasie said.

I guess not. I know I was hard on you sometimes.

Well. Yes’m. She laughed uneasily. We done what we could.

Well, still.

All right, then, I forgive you, Creasie said. You can forgive me, too.

What for?

I don’t know, Creasie said. I can’t say.

Well, Birdie said, seeming distracted. All right then, I forgive you. And at that moment she diffused so thoroughly into the air her presence in this space was but a mote that Creasie could no longer see.

Creasie blinked her eyes, readjusting her sight to the dim light in the pantry. She cleared her throat. She was in the pantry in Miss Birdie’s house, still waiting on the ambulance. Her coffee’d gone cold. She looked at the cup in her hand. The hair on the back of her neck bristled up.

— For hatin you, she whispered.

SHE WALKED THROUGH the shorn corn stumps and furrows though mud would not cling to her long, thin, translucent feet. Out in the flat farmland, it was as if the earth were small, a ball no more than oh a hundred miles or so around, you could see the curve of the land so clearly, but surely she could not travel it round since she had never been around it in life and no spirit would travel into unknown lands where surely she would dissipate into the scattered bleak and deluded imaginations of a million strange and unknown souls, what hell those foreign tongues surrounding her, like some old madhouse from the days when they kept them in chains as if possessed by evil spirits. And such it would have seemed, to her. She would walk the lands she knew when awake.

She topped the little rise in the field and the homes of those who’d built out toward them north from town began to appear, drifting beneath her as if clouds skimming the surface of the earth. Ludlum’s barn with the fading paint on it, See Rock City, as if anyone around here knew what that was anymore. Skirting town and over the little subdivisions with toy houses and the graveyards, large and spread-out neatly, and some so forgotten and neglected they were just a faint and luminescent greenish glow through the brambly growth that had overtaken them. She skimmed up the tended grass plots to where she’d lain Earl more than thirty years before. And then she was there before his grave without another second having passed and she spoke to him.

Earl, it’s me, Birdie.

Only a murmuring from within. The particles of the earth hummed and spread apart like sand on vibrating glass so she could see him as through a grainy television screen. His old moldered body shivered, mushroomy eyelids blinked once or twice, a mossy old bone-stretched mummy he was, mustache grown long and flowing down into his armpits. His hands lay on his stitched and blackened chest. He coughed.

That’s what you get for all that smoking, she said. Otherwise you’d be up and about like me, maybe moved on.

But then, she thought, I’d a had to put up with you all those years.

Wasn’t the smoking, he said. How can you say that? Look what’s happened here. He ran his withered fingers over the stitching on his chest.

Well it looks awful. I never knew they cut you open.

Worse than that, Earl said.

What are you saying?

I felt fine, leaving the house. Driving out to the lake I felt a tingling spread down into my chest, like when your arm or leg has gone to sleep. Got to the woodpile, started splitting some chunks, raised up for a chop, had the ax in the air, felt something let go, felt like, and just kept on going up, with the ax, all the way.

Well ain’t that the way it happens? she said. I come through a birdsong.

I felt my heart, though. Squeezed like to field-dress a rabbit. It turned to a little ball of fire in my chest.

In another hand he then held his liver for her to see, a hard flat stone likened to the head of a caveman’s club, and colorless.

And here’s my kidneys, he said, reaching into his side and removing a couple of little withered yellow beans.

All that coffee, Birdie said.

They were silent a moment. He seemed to squint through the lacy growth on his eyes.

You were the prettiest thing, he said, it’s just a shame. We weren’t suited, were we.

I know I was pretty, but I was too young. I didn’t want to get married. You all ganged up on me cause Papa thought it best. But I should have said no. It wasn’t your fault.

Oh, well.

I’m going on, Earl.

Earl lifted his gnarled and blackened lungs.

Could you take these, they lay so heavy on me now.

She turned away. The soil sifted together again, and the grass snakelike intertwined, and she moved over the silent graveyard, once again all in the present air.

EVEN SO, GUILT gave way to the stench of his cursed feet, curling back through some root or worm or aggregating grit so that Earl recalled and relived a moment insignificant in the long thin line of his brief life, a line that focused and broadened into the Brooklyn Bridge, in the middle of which he stood beside the tower smoking a Camel and fanning himself with a copy of the Herald beneath the lantern hanging from the tower. One thing you’d think about being up north is at least it’d be cooler, but no. Hot and humid, and not a breeze but the occasional stinker full of exhaust and rotten trash. He wriggled his toes inside his socks, felt a little grimy. All that stone and macadam.

He smelled the woman before he saw her, smelled her not so much over as through the smoke of his cigarette, and cut his eyes to see her sashaying, the very word, toward him, a scissoring walk, one leg crossing over the other as it landed, well he’d see how that worked in another territory. She was wearing a Tweedie, a perfect fit on her size six and a half, but only because he’d fit her, as she’d be wearing a six were it not for him, and not nearly so happy to be sashaying across the bridge in them as she was right now. A woman with a roomy shoe is a woman with happy feet, and a woman with happy feet is a happy woman, a woman who has learned how to curl her toes outward instead of inward. Squeeze a woman’s foot when you’re fitting her shoe and, if she’s game, you’re her man, simple as that, unless you’re some kind of toad, and even then you’d have more of a shot than most men. It was the blessing and the curse of the business, for sure, but he was trying to make the best of it. He had license, anyway. A man whose wife gave it to him on the average of once or twice a year at best, and looking like it would only get worse, had plenty of license in his book.

The six-and-a-half had come into the store on his last day there so wouldn’t she be some kind of reward? He saw it that way, and it was like she did too. On Monday he’d be some thirteen blocks away, opening another store, getting it going, two more stores and he would get the hell out of New York and back home for a while, but that’d be another two months. It would take at least eight women to get him through eight more weeks in New York. Some men loved New York but you could have it, have the stinking sewers and screaming subways and yapping yankees, most of them ugly as mongrel dogs. Sounded like a waddling flock of honking geese when they spoke. Birdie said she wished he’d take her and Ruthie up to be with him when he had to be away so long but he’d said he wouldn’t take them to that place to live for a million dollars a year, and meant it, and not because of the strange pussy, he could get that her along or no. But what man would bring his family to live in such a place had they not been condemned to it from the beginning? Best stay home where you can still smell something other than piss on flagstone when you step out the door in the morning, he’d said.

Of course Brooklyn wasn’t so bad in that way. The problem with Brooklyn was it was a foreign country. We couldn’t live there, he said, we speak English. You wouldn’t be able to order groceries unless you spoke Italian or Hebrew, he said. Jews and Wops and old-country drunken Irishmen, and crowded with them. And you won’t find a nigger to do for you the way you will back home. You’d best stay here and wait this out, I’ll have my own store back home soon.

So the six-and-a-half walks in that afternoon about three in a black dress, a warm day in May and she’s cool, just a little sweat beading through her makeup, a little veil from her hat brim shading her eyes, red lipstick, and stands there uncomfortably, looking sort of at him, sort of at the displays, and he can tell she’s in way too small of a shoe, so he goes over and touches her elbow and says quietly, Good afternoon ma’am why don’t you have a seat and let me make your life a lot more comfortable for a change? And when he eased her shoes off and gave a quick squeeze across the ball of her foot and pressed a light and quick thumb into the arch and ran it forward he could hear the barely audible exhalation that told him, All right here’s one for the plucking.

At the end of the bridge he hailed a cab and they took it to his tiny apartment in Brooklyn. On the way up the stairs he didn’t try to time his steps to creak with hers as he had when he first moved in and brought home a woman. He’d hear a lot of crap from the landlord and landlady next day but they wouldn’t have the courage to say anything till then, so to hell with them. Always threatening to kick him out but they didn’t want to kick him out, too much trouble to get someone else, just loved to shout and shake their fists and claim they were going to kick him out. Fucking Wops. Genufuckingflect yourself over this.

He showed her the bathroom and bedroom and went into the living room to open the windows and smoke while she got ready. He was looking down on trees in smoky lamplight, the brick sidewalk showing through gaps in the leaves here and there, feeling lucky as always that at least he lived in a place here where there were a few trees growing from between the bricks. A man walked by his shoes clopping, whistling something that might have been religious, one of those old hymns that sounded like a marching number, like “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God.” None of his family except Mama had ever given a damn about religion so she’d tried to make up for them all. He’d told Birdie she could give a dollar a week and he’d take whatever that would buy him in the next world.

She was on his cot bicycling her legs in the air next to a pale patch of light slanting in like something from a painting. She was peeling off her nylons and wiggling her toes and tossing the nylons like ribbons to the floor. Her knees fell open to show him the way. He pulled loose his tie and began to unbutton, pulled his shirt off, unbuckled his belt, dropped the pants and pulled each shoe through the pantslegs one at a time and stood there in his drawers and socks and fairly new pair of Thom McAns, then stepped out of the drawers toward her nakedness, her shadowy tits and pale knees and black pouting bramble and eyes watching him like a driver waiting for a pedestrian to cross at the light, wanting to watch him. He crossed the room.

Ya not gonna take ahf ya shoes? she said, or something like that.

He knelt between her knees and held himself in one hand.

What do you care, baby, you interested in my shoes or this?

She smiled.

Whatavah.

He nudged it in.

Was thinking while they made the bedsprings creak slowly in the room so still he could see the dust motes suspended in the angled block of window light, so quiet otherwise he could distinguish individual springs on the bed and began to imagine each as having its own coiled and violated integrity, suffering the indignity of old brittling steel. He notched the toes of his Thom McAns into the edge of the frame at the mattress edge and began to push at her a little harder.

Oh-kay, she whispered, her head back and eyes closed, a half-smile on her lips.

It wasn’t leverage, though, it was the stink he couldn’t ever get rid of, embarrassing with him being a shoe man, but it was biological. Birdie made him take his shoes off outside the bedroom and sometimes still got up in the night and took them onto the back porch to get them farther away. Made him wash his feet in the tub with soap and water before coming to bed. Then still wouldn’t give him any. Was it she just didn’t like it, or she didn’t like him? She seemed to respect him, treat him with respect.

Yeah, like that, whispered the six-and-a-half, teeth on her bottom lip, digging into his back with her nails.

She knew he fooled around but like with everything else pretty much just acted like she didn’t. Acted dumb. She was naive, maybe, but she wasn’t dumb. She knew a man had to have what he had to have, and when he wasn’t poking around at her anymore she knew he was poking it elsewhere, but the subject did not come up, and would not. As far as Birdie was concerned, it would seem, the world would get along just fine without that. Maybe she thought it’d be better if grown women just played with baby dolls instead of having babies, if that was what you had to go through to get them, the babies. That family she came from had to be the most powdery dry and sexless family in the world, he was surprised they even ate meat they were so modest in their ways. A thing like that should enter a man’s mind before he marries, should mingle with his knowledge of his own family’s ways. Which in Earl’s case included an old pussyhound of a papa and a mama obsessed in her own way, she might go off to every tent meeting in twenty square miles but her main obsession was sexual, all right, every woman did this or that was a whore. Wore makeup, a whore. Wore high heels, a whore. Wore short hair, whore. Smoked cigarettes, a streetwalking whore. Painted fingernails, toenails, don’t even think it. Whore whore whore.

Now he wanted a cigarette, thinking about that, even with the six-and-a-half moving beneath him, making his prick bend up and begin to tingle. She began to get urgent, wanting to buck, and he put his whole mind to her. She had nice soft handles around her hips. He braced the heels of his Thom McAns against the cot’s railing and held her in to him. They bucked together, walked the cot out into the room. A banging on the floor more than the cot’s legs, Angelo and Angela hitting their ceiling with a broom and shouting below, the six-and-a-half shouting beneath. Even he was shouting something, huffing in a blind heat, the whole room suffused with the stink of his poor goddamn adulterous whoring feet.

Ah ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! the six-and-a-half was laughing, as tears ran down into her pale pretty ears.

TIME AND SPACE had no purchase on her. Just beyond the graveyard Birdie came upon a little glen she remembered as a child wandering off from the house to sit and look at the trees and their leaves turning and glinting in the breeze. On a little sawn trunk sat her pappy.

This is the way it happens, he said, glancing up. Like in dreams, like the way you wished it would happen in life, that you’re going along and you come upon one you love and then you go together. As it happened with the prophets and the angels.

His long white beard was beautiful in this light. His eyes no more than little pieces of sky full of fragile light, his delicate hands holding a little hickory branch, the bark peeled off its smooth surface the size of his pale fingers, little twig knobs on it like his own knuckles. She noticed something about the way he worked it.

You have your arm back.

I never missed it too much, after I learned to write again.

You stayed old. I believe I’m younger.

I was happier, old.

They went to an old house falling in upon itself in the downtown as it used to be, seventy years before. Inside in a parlor where the old sweetly rotting wallpaper peeled away in poor light, in front of a cold fire, there was a reunion of sorts of the Urquharts, her tormentors. Their teapot sat cold on a little serving table, their hair thick and brittle with growing in upon itself and no outlet. A thickening and coarsing so that it became more like the fur of animals than human hair, and their features swollen like with some long night of debauchery, a permanent hangover of sorts it seemed. And no solace. At their entrance a barely audible low and mournful howl seemed to seep from one of them, she couldn’t tell which. Old Junius squatted near the cold fire in a set of dirty white long johns, his pointed bald head with just the wisp of white hair on top no more than a bushy eyebrow’s worth, and his mean little eyes unfocused and blind.

Who’s there? he said.

His lascivious eyes put out, no light there, Pappy said. Remember how he used to could cry at will, get people to buy life insurance from him. He leaked the life out of them.

It’s the old loony son of a bitch, Merry said, her voice like the dry discordant wheeze of an old squeezebox.

I don’t like living in this house, little Levi said. He was that little boy again she’d had to carry all around Mrs. Urquhart’s house, something wrong with his legs, or so he said. Must’ve been he almost had polio.

Was always a little actor, that one, Pappy said. And wanting to be taken care of.

I don’t like this house, Levi said again. It was the repetitive tone of a pull-string doll, a simple recording he was reduced to, Levi.

She could have peeled away their gossamer clothing as easily as cobwebs. They were no more than a feather in weight, any one. This was just dust gathering into the bygone shapes, held together by her and Pappy here.

All time is in a moment, Birdie, Pappy said. These shapes are just the forms of memory and imagination.

Merry wheezed her disgust. She waved her hand and a little comet trail of dust motes suspended. She looked up at Birdie. Don’t you think yourself so pretty, she said. I held up better.

Birdie became aware of something, the dry-rot stench of Merry’s breath, even now unextinguished. If she’d known her herbs she could’ve chewed some parsley during her days anyway, she thought.

I could use a drink, Merry said.

Junius groaned at that, looked out the window, so dust-filmed the day outside seemed overcast and dull.

I think you all owe Birdie here an apology, Pappy said. All she ever wanted was peace on this earth, and to get along, and all you ever did was set upon her with lies, and jealousy, and thievery, and attacks upon her good name and character. I’ll not have it, though. God will forgive you. Apologize and let’s all go, now.

As he finished there became evident to her such an undercurrent of groans and something near quiet weeping, though all their faces remained unchanged, they dissipated into little shifting mounds of dust, sifting over the edges of their seats, and the dust of old Junius swirling in an indoor dust devil and gently up the chimney. She and Pappy followed him roaming down the deserted streets of town in which there was no one grown or prosperous but only streets full of tattered and beautiful angelic little beggars tugging and nipping at his fine suit, asking him for pennies and grabbing at his crotch and bottom, licking his hands as if to get some sweetness or else in a perversely erotic dumb show, who could say? He grew distant and diminishing, a fading figure slapping about himself as if beset with biting flies, a mere whirl of black and white receding below her and changing beyond her perception as there are ineluctable shifts of time and place in dreams, she was slipping from her own skin and felt an easy and effortless unmooring of her self here in an openness and was not fearful at all.

Finus Melonius (the Ratio of Love)

THE WHITENING SUN up at the midmorning mark and black-rimmed. Finus felt its heat already prickling at his sensitive skin. He left the office, headed to Ivyloy’s just down the block. A faded, pea-green Chevy stepside trundled past the courthouse, the figure inside but a shade in a town Stetson raising a hand. Finus waved, hardly noticing. Laughter made him look up and across the street at the courthouse lawn where a bob-haired teacher in a peach sundress gathered her small charges in the lean shadow of the monument, the little ones hopping like grounded fledglings. The young teacher’s slim shoulders, white against the straps of her dress, gave shaded suggestions of her lovely bones. In the hard yellow morning light against the bright green centipede, they were all, teacher and little children, in motion and indistinct as a dream. He had turned to walk on when from the slanting scant shadow of a lamppost materialized Euple Scarbrough, the Man Who Knew Everything Because He Knew Nothing, wouldn’t it be a skit writing him up one day, and couldn’t be too far off. Euple now had that turkey look, head notched forward on the neck, mouth open, expression like a man just saw something mortally shocking, must’ve been his own shadow. Here he came, the mechanics of his walk resembling more and more that of an old steam locomotive, arms crooked like tie-rods and pumping, and moved as if on a track, no sharp turns. Here he was. Worked his jaw a silent moment to jar speech back into commission.

— Hello, Finus. His larynx a hollow dried corncob.

— Euple.

Didn’t want to say anything more, get him started. Euple chewed his gums, blocking the walk and staring at Finus, looking all over his face like he didn’t recognize him after all, in spite of speaking, his mind putting his memory of Finus back together in pieces. Worked his jaw a moment more.

— Well I’m never eating another can of pork ’n’ beans if I live to be a hundred’n two.

Finus paused, to see if this one would die on the vine. But no.

— Was looking at the sauce. You know they use that gum from a special tree in South America, xanthan gum, drain it in little pipes look like your water faucet on the side of the house, naw, like they did the turpentine down here. Can turn it off anytime they want to, stuck in the bark of the — pause a long moment for a synaptic misfire — xanthan gum tree. Get buckets of it and that’s what they use to make the sauce of things like pork ’n’ beans. Called xanthan gum, I believe, I think I read that on the label. Seen it in salad dressing, even. And in stuff you can’t even eat, like bug spray. It’s an adhesive, something. They boil the bark, I believe. Euple paused again, his eyes wandered off into the park though his head didn’t move, and Finus for a moment thought he’d fade out and allow an escape. The teacher in the peach sundress was now standing in front of the historical marker, the children clustered around her and moving something like Mexican jumping beans in a jar.

— Or could be the guar gum, they got that, too. Changes the texture of the skin of the bean, changes the chemistry of the skin of the bean, makes it like plastic, won’t digest in your stomach, changes the bean meat into something like goat cheese, some kinda dairy by-product, something like bean curd. Harder to digest. And the gum in the sauce, with a little ketchup and sugar in there for color and flavor, it’s a binder makes it hard for the stomach to absorb water at the same time, and working against digestion, and can lead to the spastic colon, you never know what’ll come of that.

The two men stood there a moment.

Finus said, — Say you been thinking on beans.

— Yes I have.

— I tell you, Euple, I hadn’t thought about it much, but you’ve truly been studying the bean.

— Guar gum, Euple said, looking over at the park as if distracted now. -No, it’s xanthan. You look at a label, see it in just about anything. That’s the key to life. Simple observation. It’s what the scientist does. He might be watching in a microscope or he might be just setting beside the crick, but he’s watching. He’s looking at his little wife bending over to pick up the young’un, he’s thinking fulcrum, lever, distribution of weight, density of bone, muscle mass. He’s thinking all them things. If he’s a philosophical scientist he’s thinking about the ratio of love.

— The ratio of love.

— You’d know what I mean, eh, Euple said, his gaze wandering.

— Say I would, now.

— I believe you would.

The ratio of love: amazing and beautiful, whatever it meant. Maybe the ratio of love over longing, or longing over love. By God. That’s why he’d given him the op-ed column, Finus remembered. The occasional weird jewel like this. He regarded Euple, who then nodded at him as if to confirm his thought. Finus said he had to go on. Euple nodded again and shuffle-turned to watch him go. For all Euple’s turkey buzzard exterior there was still a glinting light in the old gent’s eyes, they were still a hard blue and clear, as if his hard wiring were still clean and new, which maybe it was, maybe his particular imaginative visioning though of no practical value at all was genius of a weird sort. Even so, shoot me if I ever, Finus thought. So many things Euple had enlightened him and others on, from the invention of the shoelace eyelet to the reason birds can’t swallow but just must raise their beaks to drain it down. A dog turns three times about his bed before lying down because it puts him in sync with the rotation of the earth, to which he has been on angle during his wanderings of the day, and it’s why dogs are so easygoing as a rule and forgiving of others, because they are in sync and harmony with the world and the heavens. Clocks go clockwise because there is a natural gravitational pull to the right, though in England it is slightly to the left, just a hair, which explains things. A crack in the asphalt is the manifestation of one of the zillions of tiny natural fault lines in the rock formation miles deep in the earth, communicated by minute wave action to the surface, cracking the asphalt like chocolate frosting on a jostled cake. Finus let him write a column in the seventies, but after a while people just couldn’t stand it anymore. Finus had titled the column Euple’s Views. Privately he’d called it Euple’s Screwy Views though he had never said it out loud to anyone but Lovie. Of course he would be the first to acknowledge that screwy views fit right into his paper, given his own whimsical approach to journalism.

He regarded Euple, who was standing there looking across the street at some pocket of air and working his jaw in a minor fashion, old desiccated lips parted and a crust of something pale in the corners, running through the grainy film of his days. He moved on.

Euple’s discourse on beans had dislodged a pocket of breakfast gas stuck around Finus’s ribs and it rumbled like a bubble in the bathtub making for the surface, but downward through Finus. He stopped, leaned a little against a building wall and let it brattle out, went on his way. He hardly bothered to conceal a fart anymore, and hardly dealt more than one or two a day anyway. They rarely seemed to have much odor beyond something akin to the sweetfeed you give a horse — corn, with dank rich molasses. He could track their progress through the tract. Sometimes on one side of his abdomen a creaking would begin, and sound really like the joyous squawks and burblings and intermittent drumming of a woodpecker on a grubby old tree in the woods. Then directly on the other side of his abdomen would answer the bird’s mate, a little higher on the scale, of a different warble and rhythm, as if they were just letting each other know where they dined. And then brrraaapppt! like they’d both found the hot spot and hammered away. Back before his surgery and the moderation of his diet he’d had a big problem with gas, seemed sometimes his body existed for nothing more than to produce it, as if he were fossilizing and mineralizing like some ancient buried dinosaur in the brief span of his earthly years. In that time he figured he’d produced just about every variety of methane odor a human is capable of producing, until Orin Heath had assisted Mack Modica in the removal of several malignant polyps from Finus’s colon, including a large section of the colon itself. Before they’d done this they’d irrigated him, cleaned him out with a pressure hose, it felt like, and what had at first been simple discomfort, and then grave discomfort, had then progressed into a kind of relief, a sense of a cleansing, which had then become a sort of euphoria, a moment of absolute clarity, which had then intensified to the point that he felt like his brain was on fire, tiny geysers of flame were firing from the pores in his head, couldn’t they see it? And also he had a pain down lower, but not in his ass, instead in his groin, and he peeked down to a teen boner, one of those threatened to split the skin. He tried to reach down to hide it but his arms were gently pressed back to the sheet by the firm soft hand of a fleshy nurse whose breasts he could see straight through her clothing, like X-ray vision, saw her nipples grow hard and erect before his gaze, and he looked into her eyes and saw it was Adelphia Morrisette, the daughter of Blaise Morrisette, the druggist, a girl he’d often watched bend over to stock the shelving when she was just a teenage girl helping out after school, and in that moment during the visionary irrigation he could imagine with astonishing reality his rejuvenated prick poking its way through her wiry blond pubic hair and into slick glandular softness, young tight softness, and he felt her fingers press into the flesh of his head in a grip that could have been her manifest ecstasy.

— What’s he trying to do? a nurse said.

— Hold him, he’s bucking.

They held him. Lying there, in exquisite pain, he was recalling something from school, as a boy. Fellows out in the schoolyard, describing relations of the garden variety. Finus, who’d thought himself imaginative, was astonished.

— Come on, Bates, the farm boy twanged, back on his heels, a derisive squint, you can’t tell me you’ve never fucked a melon.

HERE WAS IVYLOY’S shop now, Finus’s own ectoplasmic reflection in the glass overlaying the image of Ivyloy himself, who stood at ease with one arm on the back of his barber chair in a dream, like a heron seeming to gaze at nothing just above Finus’s head. He woke up, smiled and raised his eyebrows, just about the only hair on his big round head set up on a long skinny neck and tall bony frame. Must be a hard irony to live with, a bald barber, Finus thought, and walked on in.

— Hey, boy, have a seat. Ivyloy popped the apron out and when Finus sat he draped it over Finus’s lap while he fastened a trimming collar around his neck, then he tied the apron, swung Finus around to look in the mirror.

— What’ll it be, just a shave, or a trim, too?

— Shave, Finus said, appraising himself. -Used to be I needed a haircut every other day.

— Used to be lots of things I needed every day, Ivyloy said. He leaned Finus’s chair back and laid a hot towel across his face. -Then I got married. He hummed to himself as he worked up a lather in the soap cup. Finus could see the TV reflected in the mirror. Three women were on a talk show set, fighting, two burly men trying to keep them apart. The big woman threw her chair at the littlest one, who deflected it with her own like a swashbuckling lion tamer.

— Why don’t you ever turn on the sound? Finus said.

— I don’t want to hear it, Ivyloy said. -Just like to have the pictures moving around.

Ivyloy bent to the task, stretching a bit of cheek here and there, taking care around the jawline, stretching the skin on Finus’s neck where it dewlapped. He concentrated on the jawbone behind Finus’s right ear. On the television two muscle-bound men came up behind the two women and put them into something like half nelsons. Ivyloy’s razor skritched down into the low part of his neck, near the shirt collar, and gave Finus a pleasant prickling. He closed his eyes, to the television, to Ivyloy’s fluorescent lightbulbs, to the slanted golden light through the barbershop’s window. And in some space of time could have been years he felt the tug of a new hot towel dabbing the shaving soap away from his skin. He opened his eyes, back in time.

Ivyloy dried Finus’s face, slapped a little Mennen onto his cheeks and under his jaw and chin, then rinsed and dried his own hands as Finus stood up and palmed out a ten, received his change.

— I heard you tell about Birdie and Midfield this morning, Ivyloy said.

Finus said, — I been writing them up.

— What’s the high points?

— Nothing spectacular.

— Hmph, Ivyloy said, looking out the window. -I know you. Be writing it, She once stood accused of poisoning her husband, her crazy in-laws threatening to dig up his body and hash it out.

Finus just stared at him.

Ivyloy said, — Don’t get riled, now.

Finus looked away. In a moment, he said, — And how’s Miss Sadie?

— She’s like you, you can’t kill her. You could run that woman over with one of them big things flattens out fresh pavement, one of them big flatteners, you’d just have you a new pothole when she riz’ up, shape of Sadie.

— Say she’s a tough one.

— I done tried to kill that woman a thousand times.

— Go on, now.

— Run her over, shot her, tossed her off a cliff up in Tennessee, give her rat poison and buried her in the backyard, she just comes back in that evening while I’m having my coffee, whups my ass like a stray dog. Woman’s tough, now. No, she’s gone kill me with time, her life’s mission is to outlive me.

Finus stood there nodding, looking at him.

— Now, I know you love that old gal, he said.

— Like my own life, Ivyloy said. -What there is left of it. Hey, you must a written me up years ago.

— I have not, Finus said. -You may be brain-dead but I can wait till you stop breathing, anyway.

Ivyloy looked a little pained, but he laughed.

— Aw, hell! he called out then, as if singing a note. -I don’t believe it. You got files on ever one of us.

Finus ignored him and glanced into the mirror.

— You didn’t even comb my hair.

— Did I cut it?

— No.

— Well, then, comb it yourself, your highness. I ain’t no hair stylist, I’m a barber. I cut hair.

— You’re not disposing me to knock out a good one on you when the time does come, Finus said.

— If you wait till I’m gone, which ain’t likely to happen, as old as you are, it won’t make a whole hell of a lot of difference to me, now will it? Ivyloy popped the apron in his hands and squinched his face up in the way he had that said, So there.

HE WAS GRAVITATED in a light atmosphere of aftershave down 5th toward the little hummock upon which old McLemore Cemetery received the earthly elements. A single small cedar tree remained on the downslope beside a family plot circumscribed by a low and time-scoured brick parapet, an undermined and sunken little wall. A solitary water oak, somewhat stunted but thick with limbs and hard green little leaves, hung on in the far corner. It must be old, Finus thought, left from when this little hummock clearing was edged by the woods around, out on the southeast outskirts of the town. The yard’s old iron rail fence crooked along the borders, arthritic. He’d buried Avis there, along with his mother and father. Of course this became the last thing for which she could never forgive him. He knew he should have laid her out in Magnolia, the newer cemetery on the north end of town, where her own mother and father had bought a plot that sat waiting near their own, and where he and Avis had buried Eric. But at the time his thinking was her old man had held enough claim on the poor woman, right down to the way she could never trust a soul, could never open up and feel anything much beyond suspicion and disappointment and smoldering rage. Well, they could lay him out here in the plot next to her, let her complain throughout eternity, if she liked. He’d had Eric’s grave moved over here after Avis’s funeral. He lay beneath the cedar down below.

He opened the creaky gate and stepped through onto the dry, mown grass, its blades crunching beneath his shoes even this early, dew sucked in long before. They kept the grounds up but never watered. There’d been little rain. And this was the high ground here, nothing to drain down into the little hummock, a lone green patch in this neighborhood, with a view of the new overpass, the railyard, and beyond that downtown, looking small and upcropped and hazy. Just a short walk from here, where homes and little groceries and laundry and seamstress shops had cobbled up in the forties and fifties, the neighborhood had now declined: the shops empty, the homes listing with the topography, and housing what seemed the invisible poor. Their bare yards were littered with no broken wagons and Big Wheels, no rusted Pontiac hulls on concrete blocks. Old men and old women, probably, he didn’t even know anymore. He’d known poor Jane Caulfield, a sexless maiden who’d lived with her aunt and her aunt’s lover and partner in the dry cleaning business, until the aunt had died and Jane had been discreetly and kindly moved to a nursing home out on 39 North and stayed there until she died and was buried here in McLemore Cemetery, down the slope next to the big Schoenhof plot. She’d been a pretty young girl and no one knew exactly why she became almost a recluse and certainly an old maid after a lively youth of dances and running about, if not actual dating. Her wan smile had driven boys to fall in love with her, the first whiff of which sent her into a retreat so swift and silent it generally took them a year or two to get over it and date some normal girl.

He went to Eric’s grave first. He’d refused the military marker the army offered, and put a nice modest stone down flat at its head. The boy was mute in there, a young voice now old in time and distant, the stone nothing to Finus but cold marble etched with what might as well have been Greek or Arabic, he couldn’t read it anymore. After a minute or so he walked up the hill to see Avis. A wiry strange cat approached to arch and rub its side along the edge of her headstone, tail up and quivering while the cat turned its strange gaze upon him. The cat had an odd mouth, looked like, a cat with an underbite, you never saw that.

— You’re an odd one, Finus said, and thrust his hands into the pockets of his khaki trousers.

You’re an odd one, said the cat, its mouth quivering in the way a cat chirkling at birds will do.

— Copy cat, are you.

The cat said nothing then. It was an old tomcat he could see now, and its haunches quivered again as it sprayed a little urine on Avis’s stone.

You tainted me off men forever, the cat said then.

Finus cocked his head for a new angle on it.

The cat said, Why’d you marry me, anyway, if you never loved me?

— Don’t blame me for all that, Finus said. -You hated your old dad before you ever met me.

The cat stopped, still arched, and stared at him.

— Just because you could never stand up to him, Finus said, so you took it out on me.

You’ll never be the man he was, the cat said, its underbite forcing the odd, high-pitched chattering of a cat longing to sink its teeth into some taunting bird.

— And I thank the gods for that, Finus said. -Poor old miserable son of a bitch, no wonder he went on those drunks, and no wonder he got mean and violent when he did. Scratching a living and then a fortune out of brambly land and marginal cattle, trading on his wits and growing hard-hearted just to feed all you young’uns, and your mother got the worst of it.

Don’t even speak of my mother, the cat said. You cannot comprehend a strength like hers.

— No, Finus said after a moment, I’ll give you that. She was an amazing, sweet woman, as sweet as he was hard. I loved her, too.

You never loved anyone but yourself.

The cat lay down on the grave, its back against the headstone, and began to groom itself.

— You’re one to talk, Finus said. -You never even had that.

A little warm gust, the afterthought of a breeze, nudged his ear, an almost imperceptible rustle in the hard green leaves of the oak. Finus snorted in disgust.

— Old Mike was here, he’d shake you like a rag doll.

The cat said nothing, just stared at him. He sighed.

— I’ll get some flowers out here, he said, as much to the empty granite vase at the stone’s base as to the cat. The cat merely paused a moment, one paw suspended before its odd-shaped mouth, then resumed licking and combing its ears with the paw. Finus sighed again, wished for the first time in some fifteen years he had a cigarette, and turned back toward town.

The cat, its paw suspended midlick once again, watched him until his head disappeared beneath the cemetery’s knoll, then settled in to see what else might flit or wander into the grounds. Squeezed its indifferent eyes together and began to purr in the delicious warmth of the morning.

Finus Impithicus

THE CUSHMAN GOLF cart seemed to sag half-melted in the hard overhead sunlight on the steaming asphalt there. Its white vinyl seat was hot as a woodstove through his britches but not unbearable. And it cranked right up, stuttering to life sounding as much like a gas-powered generator as ever, and it jumped as lively as ever when Finus kicked off the brake and whipped it back out of the space and down toward the doughboy soldier monument, his old Ben Hogans rattling in their bag on the back at every bump and turn. The accelerator pedal needed a good greasing, it was sticking and he had to give it a good pop to release it, and the cart would shoot ahead, but the governor kept the speed down once he got going. He kept both legs inside the cart. Wasn’t one of those who liked to hang the left leg out, as he’d seen more than one idiot’s knee turned that way. Seemed like fat men did that more than others, why was that? Lazy? Didn’t want to have to swing more than one leg out when they stopped for the ball? Not enough room on the seat? Finus hadn’t even taken up the game until Avis died, hadn’t gotten the cart till he turned eighty, was holding up the other players, walking so slow. Turned out to be a good way to get around town on a hot, or a cold, day, too.

It had the old shaft-type steering mechanism, which Finus loved, was painted a plain off-white, no roof like the newer electric E-Z-GOs, and the biggest difference from them was its motor, the little two-stroke gasoline job that announced to anyone, on the course or on the streets of Mercury, that Finus Bates was rounding the bend.

As he was, past the World War I monument and onto 22nd Avenue, headed down 7th Street. He could see the jumpy reflection of himself and the cart in the plate-glass windows of the old Kress Building, where the town boys boxed these days, building gutted and adorned in the center of the old floor with an elevated ring. He honked his claxon in front of the fire station, where the boys all flung an arm up from their lawn chairs and hailed.

Looming now in a sort of plantation palatial splendor and unavoidable, Grimes Funeral Home basked in the morning’s heat, its tall white columns like silent sentries, half a dozen large white rocking chairs on the veranda. He parked the Cushman at the curb and went on in. The air-conditioning quickly turned the sweaty parts of his shirt to coldpacks and Finus peeled it loose from his skin and jiggled it while he cooled.

He hated how funeral parlors went for opulence in the grand lowbrow middle-class fashion as if we all were shooting for such a parlor in heaven, but it served us right after the hymns about streets of gold. Here in Grimes’s old foyer the windows were either leaded and colored glass supposedly from Italy, as in the front door and side panels, or clear and wavy with antique imperfection, as in all the other windows, and when one stood in the hushed, sunlit rooms and looked outward through the warped panes, the view seemed appropriately distorted when one considered he was standing in the halfway ground, an earthly equivalent to limbo, the place where we stood between the worlds of the living and the dead. This idea, the situation, was appealing to Finus. If it weren’t for the pretentious furnishings, the Italian or Victorian fainting couch (a divan, he supposed, or maybe a chaise longue), the high-backed stuffed chairs done out in embroidered crimson silk, the dolorous presence of an ancient pump organ in the foyer complete with hymnbook open to “Come, Ye Disconsolate,” he would have thought Parnell’s place quite pleasant. But he couldn’t get past the ridiculous idea, reinforced by the luxurious Cadillac hearse, gleaming metal caskets with plush pillowy pink and blue linings, and the fat, florid, professionally mournful faces of Parnell’s two young assistants, stationed at the parlor doors like courtly eunuchs, that some poor truck farmer or frame carpenter who never felt comfortable in a suit his whole life should want to be trussed up, made up, displayed like a mannequin, and then paraded through town as if he’d been the third duke of Ellington or whatever. Ceremony was important, sure, but ceremony could be as simple as washing a body with cool rags and laying it out on a plank.

He’d thought Parnell’s place more interesting when his wife, Selena, was alive, her presence something like a silent screen tragedienne’s, intense and weird but it had seemed appropriate to the setting, at least gave it a little flavor in Finus’s opinion. Why shouldn’t the parlor of the dead be a weird place? Though the dead be among the living at all times, they are not in their bodies, which people paid such as Parnell to briefly preserve as a strange totem to their own finite forms in a way not so different, as far as Finus could see, from the way in which they preserved sported beasts on the walls or in museums or, in a more subtle sense, the way they kept the images of those they loved or thought interesting preserved on little pieces of photosensitive paper. And the thing about photos was that as truly as they recalled the way light struck and rebounded from the object of our bodies at the time the camera’s shutter blinked, it was still a lie. A piece of photosensitive paper was not a retina, was not attached to a brain, so the image was at best secondhand and all the immediacy of the image’s vitality and meaning to the viewer was lost, reincarnated as a kind of art. There was its value and its limitation.

Here now came the little footballish shape of Parnell Grimes, these days looking partially deflated with his advancing years, advancing slowly toward Finus in the warbling light of the room, arm and tiny mottled pinkish greeting hand outstretched. He was bald on top but for a little tuft of down at the front of his head that he kept oiled to a dull silver and pulled to one side instead of straight back like anyone with a smidgen of self-awareness would have done. Well I can’t criticize the bald, Finus said, running a hand through his own thick white hair and allowing himself a cool and calming moment of mortal smugness.

Parnell clasped Finus’s large hand in both his own and drew close, looking up sympathetically, as if he couldn’t break the habit.

— Finus. Good to see you. Come on back to the office and sit down.

Finus followed his little waddling shape out of the main parlor, casketless at the moment, past the other arched and stuccoed entrances to mournville where space awaited other dead, to Parnell’s modest but beautifully decorated walnut-and-oak-furnished office in the sunny corner room back of the house.

When they were seated, Parnell leaned back in his chair, put his little hands before him in an attitude of contemplation or prayer.

— Now what can I do for you today, Finus?

Finus said well he thought he’d get the official word on the cause of death for Midfield plus an update on the services, and Parnell gave Finus his official grim nod, cleared his throat and shuffled through a few papers on his desk and said, well, it appeared to be cardiac arrest as he’d suspected, though just between you and me Midfield did have a fairly high level of alcohol in his blood and the cause may just as well have been liver failure, at least to some degree.

— Say he’d probably been drinking for a while.

— Quite a while, I imagine.

— Been on a drunk.

Grim nod.

— And Birdie? Her heart, too, I’m sure.

Grim nod. -A lot of fluid around it, as expected.

They sat in silence. A clock ticked on Parnell’s wall and Finus glanced up to see his favorite object in this place, a cuckoo clock mounted in a little birdhouse. He remembered initially fearing to see what might pop out of there upon the hour, perhaps some little rattly skeleton or a little body tray to slide out as if from a morgue, the corpse sitting up to say Cuck-oo! After all a skull paperweight lay on papers at the rear of the bookshelf behind Parnell. Didn’t look real, though. Too white. He’d never asked. Oddly indiscreet, it seemed to him, for an undertaker.

He wasn’t ready to get on, yet, but couldn’t think of much to say as Parnell was an odd one, not like undertakers Finus knew who were generally average citizens, interested in this and that, if possessed of a light-switch activation for maudlin gravity. Parnell and Selena had never had children, never went to a sports event, attended only the sermons at church and never Sunday school or Wednesday suppers, and never belonged to a weekend supper club. People said they’d often driven over to Jackson or up to Birmingham on weekends, to see movies and plays and so on, the occasional symphony concert. He supposed they were cultured, Parnell had that dignified air, and Selena, you’d have thought her an heiress if you hadn’t known she was just a postman’s daughter from Mercury, Mississippi, and married to a local undertaker there. The way she always had one of Parnell’s eunuchs drive her here and there in Parnell’s Lincoln while she sat in the backseat to one side, staring ahead or reading a book, and was not going to the grocery store or the drugstore but to get her hair done or for a manicure or out into the country, as it was said every now and then one of the eunuchs would drive her to a little spot out at the old springs where she would swim alone for half an hour, dry off and then come back, her hair in a white towel, herself in a thick white robe.

— Well other than all that, how you getting along, Parnell? he finally said.

— Oh, fine, in general, Parnell said. -You? How’s your health, Finus?

Always an ominous question from his ilk.

— Well as can be expected, Finus said. -Get much worse and I expect you’ll know it.

They laughed.

— I was just thinking about your missus, gone all these years, Finus said. -I’m sure you still miss her.

— Yes, Parnell said, nodding, looking down for a moment, as you miss your loved ones, I’m sure. Then he said, — Sometimes it seems like she’s not really even gone, even now.

— I know what you mean, Finus said.

— Do you? Parnell said with a little smile, looking up.

— Probably not the same thing, Finus said.

Parnell gave him a curious look, the smile gone and the old look of grief returning, except it looked like the real thing now and not his practiced expression, but said nothing.

— Mrs. Bates and I were not much the lovebirds, Finus said.

— Ah, Parnell said, nodding with a sad conspiratorial smile. -I heard you on the radio this morning, saying Miss Birdie had been your childhood sweetheart.

— An exaggeration common to the neglected, Finus said with his own sad conspiratorial smile.

Parnell added an actual wink to his own.

— I’m surprised, then, that you two never became the item in your later years, her a widow and all.

— Mrs. Bates and I never divorced.

— Yes, but after her death, Parnell said.

— Well neither of us was that keen on marriage, after our firsts, Finus said. -Poisoned by it, you might say.

— Yes. That old business, Parnell said, and the moment, somehow, turned inexplicably awkward. -Well, he said, with a nervous laugh, I’m certain Mrs. Urquhart wasn’t poisoned.

— As opposed to Earl, you mean? Finus cocked his head.

— Ha ha! Parnell said. His smile tightened and he raised his brows.

— Something funny about all that, even now, ain’t it, he said to Parnell, giving him the stare. -You know I always wondered if that man’s goddamn crazy family didn’t really do him in, you know, and giving Birdie all that grief about it. They’re all gone, now, of course. Birdie outlived them all.

Parnell only pursed his lips and nodded shortly. Only glancing to meet Finus’s gaze.

— Birdie always said the only way to get along with your in-laws is to outlive them, Finus said. He allowed a little smile to Parnell, which seemed to ease him a bit. But then it wasn’t an easing. It was something else, like a heaviness descending on the strange little fellow. He took on an almost maudlin look. Guess that shouldn’t be surprising, Finus said to himself, given his trade.

— Well, maybe it was just as well you and Miss Birdie never married, Parnell said then, meeting Finus’s gaze in a way so open and uncharacteristic, so free of his professional demeanor, Finus felt he was seeing him for the first time.

— How do you mean?

Parnell sat there looking at him frankly, and seemed as if something like grief and regret rested solidly in his features. It made Finus feel oddly vulnerable, himself, just sitting there looking at Parnell looking that way. He wanted to look away from it.

Parnell got up after a moment and opened a filing cabinet drawer. He drew a file from the front, laid it on his desk, sat down again, and rested his short blunt fingertips on it.

— Off the record, of course. Finus nodded. -And just between us. If I share this with you, Finus, it is not for publication nor for any other sort of dissemination. My father’s reputation, as well as Miss Birdie’s, depends on it. It’s weighed on my conscience, though, as I expect it weighed on hers.

Finus leaned forward now. He looked at the file, but couldn’t read its subject heading from where he sat.

— This is a collection of articles and information I gathered over some years on the Atomic Energy Commission, Parnell said, and settled his own gaze on Finus then, as if he’d said something final. Finus looked at the file a moment, looked back at Parnell, then picked up the file and skimmed through it. From what he could gather, going fairly quickly through it, there had been a long-running government project to collect dead bodies and body parts, on the sly, for use in testing the effects of atomic radiation on the human body. He looked up after a minute.

— I’ve read a little about this, over the wires, he said. Parnell said nothing.

Finus said, — What could this have to do with Birdie?

The men sat silently a minute, looking at one another.

— This information, Parnell said, the possibility that my father was doing this, selling bodies and body parts to the Atomic Energy Commission in the early phases of that program, was used to blackmail me. The state forensics lab wanted to take a closer look at Mr. Earl’s heart, after seeing the sample I sent them. He paused. -I talked them out of it.

— Are you saying you had sold them Earl’s body? That makes no sense. He was in his casket till you closed it and put it in the ground, as I recall.

— I’m not saying that, Parnell said.

— Well what does this have to do with Birdie, then?

Parnell shook his head. Then he told Finus what had happened the night Creasie came to get Earl’s heart. And told him about the sample he sent to the state lab, and his putting them off. About everything.

Finus looked down at the file in his hands. When he looked at Parnell again, Parnell’s face seemed collapsed in a kind of baffled relief.

— What I don’t understand, Finus said, is how in the hell Birdie would or could have known anything about all this — he tapped the file with his fingers. -That’s what doesn’t add up. Aside from the general macabre absurdity of the whole story.

Parnell sat down in his chair and blinked his eyes like a confused child.

— Finus, I have no idea. That, I have never understood.

— It was Creasie, her maid, who came by to get it.

Parnell nodded.

— And kept saying she said this and that.

Nodded.

— But never said Miss Birdie said.

— No, Parnell said. -She didn’t.

— So maybe she didn’t mean Birdie.

— Who else, Finus?

— Hell, Finus said, taking out his handkerchief and blowing his nose with a flatulent honk, I guess that’s the question, all right.

Ten minutes later Finus let himself out, and stood on the sidewalk in a wind buffeting him and the Cushman sitting impassively at the curb, both bathed in fleeting shadows of something in the sky. He looked up. Dark baby cumulus drifting from the south as if in search of their mother. And there to the east beyond the Dreyfus Building’s radio tower the mother cloud rose up like a billowing anvil, an atmospheric god.

Finus Magnificus

HE DIDN’T KNOW what to do with himself, where to go. The Cushman sat there, mute and pale off-white. He heard the low loud drone of an old Stearman crossing town to land at the airport, some ex — fighter jock turned crop duster at the stick no doubt. At the stoplight a single car sat awaiting green. A new station wagon, windows rolled up and air-conditioned, vacation luggage strapped onto the roof. He couldn’t tell what model car it was since they all copied the Japs in design, could’ve been a Ford or a Mitsubishi or a Mercedes for all he knew, and two nice-looking young ladies in big sunglasses and hair pulled back were chattering away at one another, the driver pointing at something down the street, and in the backseat a boy of about ten or so, looking straight at Finus, the boy’s hair combed neatly as if he’d just been to the barber though that was unlikely, his face a small pale oval making his dark eyes seem large. There was no expression on the boy’s face beyond frank curiosity over Finus, an old man standing on the corner looking lost. The light turned green and the car turned left toward the viaduct under the train tracks, no doubt headed for the beach highway south. Finus felt a nerve kick in his pelvis and could move his limbs again, unsure if he’d seen this boy or if he was a vision and having nearly forgotten him again anyway, lost in more reverie of his own son at a little less than that age, looking down at him from the crook of a muscular live oak where Finus had constructed a railed platform with a rope ladder which little Eric could haul up after him to keep all others out, and seeing in the boy’s eyes that fascination with power and height.

A gusting moan from the Stearman turning final way over at the field, carried in a sound pocket. A little puff of a breeze, as if from the delicate faraway movement of its wing, carried the odor of honeysuckle from some hidden patch and broke through the lingering acidic exhaust from the station wagon with the woman and the boy.

Finus looked up and blinked in the bright sunlight that allowed no shadow in its merciless position straight overhead, no shadows among the group of schoolchildren huddled into a jittery bunch around the skirts of a young woman about to herd them into the library across the street, same bunch he’d seen that morning, no doubt on some field trip. Their motions as active and contained as ants in glass. His vision blurred with sudden grief and self-lagellation.

There was a sound from the cart groaning against its brake, as if it were impatient, wanting to move on. Finus got in, kicked at the stubborn brake, headed out. Not sure where he was headed.

To Knoll Creek, it seemed, the decrepit course that had thrived in the twenties, when Mercury itself thrived, but which now was as unkempt as a cow pasture, which it had originally been, with knots and whorls of St. Augustine and clumps of Bahia corrupting the Bermuda in the greens, johnson grass wild in the fairway roughs, you might as well drop out of those suckers. It was like playing golf on a farm. There was a par three on the back side Finus had been trying to hole-in-one for years. The cart puttered him to the north end of the town, hugging the curb, cars passing and uttering little honks, whether in hello or watch out or move over he didn’t pursue.

He veered off the road onto the fairway of number 11 and took the path down the hill across the street and sped down the long fairway of par-five number 12, on his way to the par-three water-hazard 13. The long flat fairway quavered in the heat and gave off ripply, otherworldy visions of the pines behind the far green. Passed two men and two women walking pull carts together. They all waved, hailed. Finus passed on. At the 13 tee a twosome had just hit. He’d have time to hit before the party on 12 got there. The course seemed pretty empty. Too hot to play, for most. Too hot for Finus, too, but all he wanted was a good tee shot, one try (with maybe a mulligan) at a one-holer here, to make his day, make his life. Hell he might not ever golf again if he made that shot, and so be it. The twosome, a couple of young fellows he recognized though didn’t recall their names, had knocked respectable shots, one to the green, the other to the fringe. They motored down, chipped and putted, then waved to Finus as they replaced the flag, got into their electric cart, and drove up along the little copse path to the elevated number 14 tee. Out of sight.

Finus drove up the path and stopped beside the 13 tee, jammed on the parking brake. The Cushman sputtered to a halt and died. He took out his five iron and a ball and tee and walked up onto the tee. Used to be he hit an eight iron on this hole, a mere 130-yarder. Then later on a seven. Then he gave in and went on up to the five. He had no backswing to speak of anymore. Hell, if he kept playing, he’d be using a driver here before long. Took his best swing with the five now to green it, and that was rare.

He teed up a new Titleist and straightened up, hand to his lower back to assist the move, and stepped back from the ball. The flag was close today, near the tee side of the green, down from the little rolling rise in the middle. The hazard, a little pond laced with water lilies and a few cattails, stood unrippled by nary a breeze.

He stepped up to the ball, waggled the club, an old Hogan with a sweet spot the size of a dime at best. Squared off. Looked pinward, back down at the ball. Took a breath, hauled back, and hit.

Not a good one, toward the front of the club face. He felt it wobble when he hit. Looked up to see the ball go right of the green and low, roll toward and into the little dry trap there. All right, then, a mulligan.

He reached into his pants pocket and got out a second ball, a fairly new Pinnacle he’d found in the rough on 18 that winter. He looked around, found a tee broken near the point, that’d do. Teed it up and stepped back. Concentrate, he told himself. He took a look at the pin, squared up, and addressed the ball. Said, — Only you, you white and dimpled spherical son of a bitch. You were made for this hole only. He focused all his mind on the ball, on the club face resting perfectly before it. He drew back slowly, his feet planted firmly, and stroked through it, a nice smooth swing. A nice click he hardly felt in the shaft. Looked up then to see the ball arcing high and beautifully straight up into the cerulean blue. He sang in his mind to himself. Down it came, and he lost sight of it in the glare of noon and the backdrop of pale green washed-out summer foliage.

By God. By God, he thought, it might have gone in. Finus’s blood ran hot and thrilling to every little vein end in his body. Like a mild induced electric current to his brain. He wanted to jump in the air with excitement. Held the club up in the air with one hand, a victorious gladiator with his weapon. By God.

He dropped the club where he stood and scurried, or something like that, down the tee slope to the cart and got in, cranked it. He hit the brake with his foot to unlock it. Hit it again. Stubborn brake didn’t want to let go. He gripped the wheel and leaned down to check the brake pedal with his free hand. Wasn’t thinking clearly. When he leaned down he accidentally braced his right foot against the accelerator pedal, which disengaged the brake and the cart shot forward, nearly tossing Finus out onto the path. He yelped and yanked on the steering wheel trying to right himself, and the cart veered, at out-of-the-gate speed, off the path, bumped down the front tee slope, and splashed at around ten miles per hour into the pond at a sharp angle and turned over. Finus, gripping the steering wheel with both iron hands, was trapped there on the muddy bottom of the pond in three feet of water. He’d had a leg out of the cart while trying to free the brake and the side of the cart now held it, not too painfully because of the soft mud, fast to the bottom of the pond.

He’d involuntarily closed his eyes upon impact. But now, in a panic at realizing he was under water and pinned there, he opened them again. He could see nothing for a second or two, with the mud swirled up in a cloud, but then it cleared and he could see his situation. His leg beneath the overturned cart. The dappled surface of the pond just out of reach of the hand he stretched tentatively toward it, as if he could grip the water’s surface and thereby pull himself to air and safety. But before he realized he was suffocating for sure, the knowledge that this or no other miracle would save him settled in and he somehow received it calmly. All right, then. As good a death as any other, better than some. Only a few seconds more in these old lungs. He saw the pale and shadowed undersides of the lilies. The rippled and shimmering blue sky just beyond the still disturbed but settling surface of the pond. The ethereal limits of this beautiful world. A hole in one, by God. He had to believe, in this brief and finite moment, that he had put it in. The little projectile launched from his Ben Hogan five iron in a perfect arc into the realm of what we considered was no longer the firmament but an unfixed and evolving and volatile environment, that followed its planned, theorized journey down to the surface of green 13, to the little red-and-white pin with the yellow flag, and into the little hole with a sweetly satisfying earthly cluck. Birdie never gave a damn about golf, but still he wished he could have had her with him to see that.