The Heaven of Mercury

A Pair of Boots

LATE AFTERNOON, A flurry of people coming to rap on the back door to the kitchen and dropping off cakes and pies, Lord knows where they come from, must have had them just waiting for Miss Birdie to die, and then a little later come hams and casseroles and extra coffee percolators, the big kind like little upright tanks, and plates of fried chicken and bowls of potato salad and big pitchers of ice tea. And for a while Creasie stayed in the middle of it all, shuffling here and there in her bare, dry, flattened feet, handing this and that, being handed, and then it got so crowded she had to get away and sit down.

She sat in her chair in the pantry sequestered from the buzz and clatter of the chattering, munching mourners, drinking a cup of coffee, and except for the little turn of her bent wrist that moved the cup to her lips, and the little pooch-out of her lips she’d make to meet the cup, and the slurping sound that came thereof, she was silent and still. And she wasn’t thinking about all these white people milling around at all but about old Oscar the electric colored dummy Mr. Earl had owned when she was just a girl working for them early on. She was wishing she had asked Miss Birdie one more time about the dummy before she passed, but it wasn’t something she could explain too easily because Miss Birdie would’ve never understood about Frank, because she couldn’t have sensed the spiritual warp and weave that connected Frank and the dummy Oscar in her young and terrified mind at the time, and so now had her half hoping for some strange miracle that would make the world more alive than she’d come to fear it was, with just us flatfoots moping around day to day.

After the baby potion hadn’t taken, just before Frank left, she’d stayed away from the ravine for two years. With Frank gone, she tried to resign herself to this fate, this life that was to be hers forever, as far as she could tell. She stayed her Sundays even in the cabin, sitting on her porch, took up dipping snuff herself, went to town sometimes when Mr. Earl would go in to check on his inventory, riding in the backseat of one of his new cars, closing her eyes so she wouldn’t be scared half to death by the way he would speed.

The hardest times were when Mr. Earl would go to get his father, Mr. Junius, on Fridays and bring him over for the weekend. Old Mrs. Urquhart had died and they felt sorry for him. Creasie didn’t. She wished him dead. She wished him pain and suffering. She wished she could administer such an end, herself.

He’d gotten older, fatter, balder, paler. No meaner-looking than before, really, still with his pale, pig eyes, thin lips, pointy head, foul mouth. Wandering from the guest room in the back in his suspender pants and T-shirt and house slippers, seemed stiffer, like age finally catching up to him all of a sudden, wouldn’t be catching no girls alone in a shed no more, now. Couldn’t bend his neck good, but would watch Creasie with those pale pig eyes when she had to pass him in the den or the living room, or bring a plate of food to the table when they ate.

Just a little simmer inside her, began to grow, till she was so angry it was into a boil. Hatred for that old white man. Hatred for what he’d done to her. He looked like some big boil himself, full of ugly, full of poison. That was what made her think of Vish again. She sat out on her porch Sundays, when she didn’t have to go over to the house, and watched them load him in the car to take him back to his empty home in Alabama. And finally one Saturday night before she went home to the cabin she said to Mr. Earl that if he was going into town for inventory the next morning she’d like to get a ride to the ravine.

The old man rode along, sitting up front with Mr. Earl, Creasie rode in the back. She sat just behind the driver’s seat, and though the old man couldn’t turn his head to look back at her she could see his eyes cutting left trying to. Once he turned his shoulders and glanced at her, and she was looking at him. He scowled and turned back to face forward. Said not a word when Mr. Earl dropped her off, said he’d be back by around five that afternoon.

She carried a large bag with her, a tote bag, and stuffed in the bottom of it beneath some old clothes Miss Birdie had given her was her real gift for Aunt Vish.

It was early November. She made her way down the trail, still leaved but thinning, trees looking puny but arcing up scary and their colors darkening away from October bright. But morning sun sleeving through them fuzzy yellow and cheerful enough, though it was hard for this to warm her heart, bent on a purpose.

Vish was sitting on her porch in her rocking chair, saw her walking up and kept rocking, working her lip on the snuff. Didn’t look a bit different, old woman was ageless. Time passed just through her, moving on, leaving her toughened and unmoved, she’d beaten it, looked like. Wearing a colorless old dress, a yellowed old piece of sackcloth looked like wrapped around her head, so she looked like some kind of black Arab, rocking and watching her. Creasie reached into the tote bag, pulled out the paper sack, and set it down beside Vish’s old dusty bare feet, there like the roots of a blackened cypress pulled up and dried hard in the dry air. Toenails like black bark chips on burnt sticks.

— What’s that, now? Vish said.

She didn’t say anything, just stood there. Vish stopped her rocking, looked down at the sack, then leaned forward to reach it, pulled the top open and peeked inside. She leaned over farther, fished into the sack, and pulled out the pair of lace-up shoes, a pair of low dress boots.

— They bout your size, I figure, Creasie said.

She’d seen Miss Birdie wearing them and then didn’t see them for a long time and had heard her say they didn’t feel right on her feet, didn’t like the heel, which was kind of high, about a two-inch heel. And they sat in the back of her closet long enough to be forgotten and then the last afternoon before they were going to take Mr. Junius home, while they were having their coffee after dinner, Creasie found them in there and tossed them out the bedroom window, sneaked over and picked them up late that night after they’d gone to bed, and took them back to the cabin.

Vish set the boots in front of her chair beside her feet and looked at them, working her mouth. She leaned over and spat off the porch, looked at the shoes again. She took the sole of one foot and rubbed it against one old withered bare shank, then did the same with the other. Angled them into the boots and pushed down into them. She lifted her feet and plocked them in the boots down on the porch boards a couple of times.

— Lace them for me, she said.

Creasie got down on her hands and knees in front of Vish and laced up the boots.

— Help me up.

She helped Vish stand up. Vish looked out over the tops of the trees and Creasie could see her flexing her old feet and stiff toes inside the soft leather boots. She bent her knees just the slightest bit and stood back up, then sat down in the chair.

— What you want, now?

She told her. And after a minute Vish said to help her up again. She went inside the cabin, stayed for a long time it seemed like, her new boots clopping on the pine floors, then finally came back out and handed Creasie a little pouch, just a piece of old fabric tied into a pouch with a piece of black thread.

— Just a little pinch in a cup of coffee be plenty.

— Yes’m.

— And child. You never got it from Vish.

— Yes’m.

She tucked the little pouch into the pocket of her coat and went over to her cabin and made a fire in the stove. She drank some coffee and sat in her living room looking out the window at the trees and the little glow of light around all the darkening leaves. There was a little breeze all day, that would come and go, and the tops of the trees seemed to jiggle in a secret and perverse delight at their imminent fall. It was nice sitting in her cabin again, which seemed abandoned forever of what she’d had there, the life with her grandmother and mother, the walls insulated with decades of the comics pages from the Sunday papers. Dust on everything like a light and settled, dried silt. Cobwebs and spiderwebs like glinting decorations in the fading light.

Toward the late afternoon she banked the stove, closed the cabin, and walked back up the trail and waited at its head for Earl and Junius to drive up. Pretty soon they did, she got in the back, they drove back out. She thanked Earl for the ride. He said he’d see her at breakfast, that Miss Birdie had some supper fixed for him.

— You need anything to eat? he asked her. -Papa’s staying here tonight, I’m going to call it a day, take him home in the morning. You can come in and get a plate.

Junius was asleep in his seat, snoring.

— No, sir, I had something, she lied. She wasn’t hungry.

She went to her place and took the little pouch from her coat pocket and put it up on the shelf in the kitchen beside her coffee tin. She went to bed early.

LATE NOVEMBER, WHAT was left of a hurricane down on the coast come through, cracked off the tops of two pine trees at the pasture’s edge, pushed down one of the old oaks in the Urquharts’ front yard, big roots exposed and clods of red dirt hanging from them. Mr. Earl hired some men to come out and saw the tree up to season for firewood, and Creasie had thought how Frank would be doing that, had he stayed. The chain saws whined and muttered for two days, and unsplit cordwood stacked up out on the north side of Creasie’s cabin, under the shed along the fence line. And December then. She went to town on Christmas Eve and did some shopping for herself. She bought a little wristwatch with a gold band, and set it by the clock tower at the Catholic church, and she took a late supper at the bus station. It was a breakfast supper, scrambled eggs and a piece of sugar ham and toast and coffee. Then she hailed a cab as it was rolling slow past the monument. The driver got out to let her in, an old colored man wearing a cabbie’s cap with the short plastic bill.

— Yes, ma’am, evening, ma’am, he said, closing her door and getting back into the driver’s seat. -Where to?

She settled herself, touched the wristwatch on her arm, put her hands in her lap.

— The Urquhart house, out on the Macon highway.

The driver looked at her in the rearview mirror a second.

— Yes, ma’am, he said. -Yes, ma’am, that fare might be a mite steep.

— Yes, sir, I know it, that’s all right, she said. -It’s Christmas Eve.

He smiled and laughed, put the old station wagon into gear.

— Yes, ma’am, all right then, he said, and drove her on out, the radio tuned to a station playing Christmas music.

— Going to spend Christmas with your family, then, ma’am? he said.

— Yes, sir, Creasie said. -I am.

— That’s nice, he said. -Me, too. He looked at her in the mirror, but she looked away, and he didn’t talk anymore, and let her off in the dark driveway of the Urquharts’ house. She paid him.

— You sure this all right, ma’am? he said. -Looks like nobody’s home.

— Yes, sir, they just out for the evening.

He touched his cap in parting and drove off. She watched the headlights swing back onto the highway and stood in the darkened driveway a few minutes. Miss Birdie and Mr. Earl were in town with their children and grandchildren. They’d come in later, then get up in the morning and go over to Alabama, see old Junius. Then come back later that night.

From where she lay on her bed awake she saw their headlights swing into the driveway and then the garage. She kept no light, didn’t want them to know if she was out there or not. Was a still night, and cold. She huddled under the covers in her clothes, shoes beside the bed. Woke up the next morning late and tired, and the Urquharts’ car gone. She ate some cold cornbread with buttermilk, went back to bed. Late in the afternoon she went over to the Urquhart house and made some vegetable soup, ate a little, and left it on the stove warm for when they returned. She saw the car pull in, headlights on, heard the doors open and shut. A little later a knock on the door. She got up and spoke through it. It was Mr. Earl.

— Just checking to see if you’re all right, Creasie, he said.

— Yes, sir, I’m okay. She mustered a little chuckle to reassure him. Oh yes, she was a happy nigger.

He said, — You have a good Christmas?

— Oh, yes, sir, I went to see some kinfolks in town.

— I didn’t know you had kin in town.

— Yes, sir. Distant.

— Well, good, good. Well, we’ll see you in the morning then.

— Yes, sir.

After a moment he said, — Merry Christmas.

— Yes, sir, she said. -Merry Christmas to you, too.

And next morning she was up, washed, and cooking breakfast for Mr. Earl, who went in to work early as usual, for the after-Christmas sale. And Miss Birdie up early, too, already had the coffee going when Creasie got there. She did some cleaning up. And through December, and January, no visit from Mr. Junius, until the end of the month one afternoon Mr. Earl announced he was going to get his papa and bring him over, he’d been feeling poorly, and was going to let him rest up awhile here and eat well, and visit with Levi and Rae and Merry. Next morning he went to get the old man and came back with him in the afternoon.

Old man had lost weight, was kind of ashy pale. Stayed in the guest room in the back for most of that evening and the next day, not much left in him she figured, but enough to blow on out like a bit of dust on the windowsill. She offered to take him some soup but Miss Birdie said no, she’d take it back to him. Offered to take him some coffee the next morning, Miss Birdie said — No he likes me taking care of him I think, getting sentimental in his old age. He finally came out of the room for dinner that day on his cane, walking slow and wearing pajamas and a bathrobe, shuffling his way down the hall and through the sunporch and dining room to the kitchen, and sat down at the kitchen table to have lunch with Miss Birdie and Mr. Earl. Creasie served them and went into the pantry to eat. She sat down and set her plate on a shelf and put her fingers into the pocket of her apron, where she had the little pouch Vish had given her. Brought it up and sniffed at it. It was a tangy rottenness in there, like some kind of noxious mushroom dust. She heard them clattering their plates, heard that die down, heard more talking. Got up and went back into the kitchen, poured coffee for Mr. Earl and Miss Birdie, took it to the table.

— You want some coffee, too, Mr. Junius, she said, no expression on her face.

— No, no, none for me, he mumbled, gruff and not looking at her.

She went back into the kitchen, stood by the window looking out.

— You sure you don’t want a cup of coffee, Mr. Junius?

— I said I didn’t. She heard him grumbling to them about her.

— I think I’ll go over to the lake for some exercise, Mr. Earl said. -Cut some wood from that tree that fell last year.

— Earl, don’t tax yourself, Miss Birdie said. -We got plenty of wood from that tree that fell in the storm.

— That’s still green, won’t be dry till next year, Earl said. -And we’re a little low on seasoned wood here at the house. That tree’s been down more than a year and I imagine it’s ready. I just feel like getting out and doing it, anyway. Need some fresh air.

— I’d go with you, I was feeling better, old Junius grumbled, and headed shuffling back to his room.

Just her lot to live here, wait on these people, live in that shanty out back of their house, be at their beck and call. And nobody but them, anyway. Mama dead since she was so little, her daddy she didn’t know where, gone off, could be dead, Vish never said. She stood at the window. She saw, out on the side lawn and in a flat dull ray of winter sun angling over the hedges through the junkyard across the road, the endless days of nothing but the same, and being nothing but a nigger in the world.

The others had left the dining room. She was alone. She poured a fresh cup of coffee, took out the pouch, poured it all into the cup, and stirred it. She took it back to Mr. Junius’s room and tapped on the door. No answer.

She went on in. He was asleep. She set the coffee on the table beside the bed.

— Just in case you changes your mind, she said, in case he was really awake. He said nothing, breathing heavy. She went out, back to the kitchen, into the pantry, and sat in her chair. Waiting and hoping, and dreading, too. Didn’t know how long she’d sat there when she heard Mr. Earl come into the kitchen in his boots, heard a clatter in the sink.

He stuck his head into the pantry, scowling.

— What the hell did you do to that coffee?

She sat there like a mute, frozen. Then she managed to say, — Is he all right?

Earl snorted.

— He’s better off than I am. I’m the one tried to drink it. That’s the worst cup of coffee I’ve ever had in my life. Tasted kind of like Birdie put some more of that goddamn sassafras in the pot again. Or something.

He just stared at her a minute, then shook his head, saying something to himself.

— Don’t you bother him anymore, he said. -And make a fresh pot of coffee. Just coffee. I’ll be back in about an hour.

— Yes, sir, she managed to whisper, after he’d gone out, the screen door slapped to, the truck door slammed, the truck rumbled off. The quiet came back, there in the pantry.

Last time anybody saw him alive.

Finus Resurrectus

HE WAS RESCUED BY the foursome he’d passed on the fairway of hole number 12. Pumped out, unconscious, and carried to the emergency room in the cart of one of the men who’d hit before him on 13. He lay overnight in a bed on the fourth floor of the hospital, and the next morning Orin Heath came up to give him a last check-over before letting him go home. Orin poured himself a flask cap of whiskey, opened the window, and sat in a chair beside it to smoke a cigarette.

— Looks like you’ll miss Birdie’s funeral, he said.

Finus nodded. -Might have to.

— How you feeling?

— Not too bad, considering.

— Did you have what they like to call in the National Enquirer a near-death experience?

— White light and all that? No. Birdie did, out at the rest home.

— I heard they had to revive her out there.

They were quiet awhile.

— Have a drink?

Finus shook his head no.

— Your daddy was quite a drinker, too, wasn’t he, Finus said. -What was his name? He asked though he knew and Orin knew he knew this unless the hole 13 pond water had gotten into his brain.

— Cornelius, Orin said. -Yes, he liked the corn. Said his name gave him a predilection for craving corn whiskey from the getgo. I ever tell you how I got my name? — No.

It was a game, almost a ritual, with them, came up every year or so in the regular banter. There was often some slight change in the story. -I was an accidental conception, Orin said. -Papa said to me one day when he had a load of corn in him that I was conceived on a romantic evening out in a boat on the lake, and they had it rocking. There was a loon calling, round there. Heat lightning way off, purple sky. He had a moment there, forgot who he was with. Came the time to make a decision, to take it out or leave it in. Do I take it out, or leave it in? Looked down at her face in a flicker of lightning glare, she was a stranger, made him wild with lust. Out, or in? Out, Or-in? My name reflects the grave finality of his decision.

— That’s preposterous. What’s that about the loon?

— There was a loon. It’s a strange and ancient, solitary bird. Got an egg the greenish color of tarnished copper, speckled brown. It was in the summer in the northeast, in New England, where he was at school. He brought her back here but she was never happy.

Finus said, — I believe I was named after an Irish chieftain, but I’m not sure. That or they decided I was just the finest-looking young’un.

— The loon’s got a strange call.

— You sound like you been talking to Euple.

— He came in the other day.

— Was he talking about loons?

— No.

— Beans?

— Digestive problems. He fears it’s cancer. I sent him for some tests.

— What do you think?

— Intestinal gas, Orin said. -Constipation. Talks about beans, eats nothing but meat. Never drinks water. He’s dry as beef jerky inside.

— What did you give him for it?

— Nothing. Told him to drink some of those herbal teas, instead of drinking coffee all day. I used to use them for remedies way back, before they got into the stores. I had an interest back then in what they call alternative medicine these days.

— Just the old remedies.

— Yeah. Old medicine woman down in the ravine used to make me up herb tea leaves, roots, all that crap. Worked about as well as pharmaceuticals, then. She had a garden somewhere down in there, grew what she didn’t find wild in the woods.

— Old Vish.

— That’s right.

— She used to treat all the black folks back then didn’t she.

— Well, some. Midwife, mostly. But hell she knew as much in her own way as we did, in those days. What, you want a remedy? Can’t cure old age, my friend.

Finus stood up from the edge of the bed. After a moment he said, — I’ve never believed your papa’s story. I believe Orin is derivative in some oblique way of Cornelius.

— Well, Orin said, I have rather liked being an accident. It’s relieved me of some of the burden of accomplishment. You seem to be feeling better.

— I’m all right.

Orin got up, tossed his cigarette out the window, and closed it.

— You can go on home if you want to. I’ll give you a ride. Your cart’s in the shop.

— All right. Maybe I can get out to Birdie’s later on, anyway.

— Nobody’d blame you if you didn’t. It’s not every day an old man crashes his golf cart.

— I feel all right, Finus said.

— Just take it easy, Orin said.

— I will.

— I fed your dog, let him out to do his business.

— I thank you, Finus said. -I’d like to get on home now.

— At your service, Lazarus.

HE WAITED, LOOKING out the window of his apartment, until Orin’s car had turned the corner, then skitched his cheek at Mike. The old dog looked up with his sad vacant eyes.

— Come on, old boy, let’s take a drive.

Mike followed him slowly down the stairs, taking one at a time on his old shoulders, claws clicking on the wooden steps, scratching on the sidewalk. Finus opened the pickup’s passenger door and gave him a little boost to get him onto the seat, where Mike settled down and put his snout onto his forepaws again, just like he’d been on the floor. But he was alert.

Finus took old winding Poplar Avenue to the north end of town, out past the shopping center and up the long hill, pulled over in the little dirt clearing in front of the old ruined Case house and shut off the engine, went around and helped Mike down from the truck. Together they walked slowly, both of them a little shaky-legged, careful of exposed roots and gopher holes, down the path that led down into the ravine. Though the day was dry and had not cooled, he felt an instant drop in the temperature along the shady path, which had the softened and weed-edged appearance of an old path not used so much anymore. Finus was aware of birdsong all about him, and began to notice them flitting and fluttering in the low limbs and wild shrubs on either side of the path, and crossing the path ahead of him in short bursts of flight.

They came to the low and shaded clearing at the base of the ravine. The little leafy tunnel of the trail opened up into what could only be called a woodland cathedral, its ceiling the boughs and leaves of tall oaks, sycamores, sweet gums, beech trees, and pines. The floor carpeted with pine needles and brown leaves, and furnished with small shrubby trees and the remains of a half a dozen small plank cabins on brick and pine-stump posts. These all stood on one side of a tiny creek that wound down toward a dense-looking swampy area, and on the other side of which stood bamboo thickets and lower-limbed, moss-draped live oaks. All appeared to be abandoned, at first look. Then he saw something on the little porch of the far one, and a movement, and went that way.

She sat in an old paintless rocker, though not rocking, and her eyes though cataracted looked unmistakably at him. She was as knotted up as if she were actually a strip of cured leather someone had twisted into shapes resembling a head, shoulders, crooked arms and hands, and a pair of feet on shanks so thin they couldn’t possibly hold her up. She was barefoot, though her feet were a blackened color such that he’d had to look twice to determine they weren’t in some worn-thin pair of old leather soleless shoes. Her face like an old burnt knot of lighter pine from within which the two milky pools of hardened sap regarded him calmly.

— Afternoon, Finus said, standing there.

Her eyes cut momentarily to old Mike standing droop-headed at his side.

— Are you Miss Vish? Finus said.

She nodded again, continued to look his way without speaking.

— I’m Finus Bates, run a little newspaper in town. This is my old dog, Mike.

— I don’t much like dogs, she said, her voice phlegmatic but strong for that. Then she said, nodding toward Mike, — You seems pretty healthy, yourself, for an old gentleman, but your old dog is ailing.

— Yes, I expect he won’t be around much longer.

— I don’t know much about treating dogs, she said. -Sometimes I treated a cat or a horse or a cow, but never could do much to help a dog.

— That’s all right, I’ll just let him go when he’s ready.

She looked at him a moment, nodded.

— Yes, sir, what can I do for you?

Finus said Dr. Orin Heath had told him about her. She said nothing, working her mouth a little bit, then nodded.

— How he doing, then?

— All right, all things considered.

— Still drinking that whiskey?

— Yes.

— Well, she said after a moment, it ain’t killed him yet. Maybe it keeping him alive.

— May be, Finus said.

— Them cigarettes gon kill him, though.

— I expect they will, soon enough.

— Yes, sir, soon enough. Is there something I can do for Dr. Heath, then? Ain’t nothing I can give him make him stop that whiskey or smoking.

— No, I just wanted to ask you about a couple of things.

She nodded. -You knew Mr. Case, now, ain’t that so.

— Yes, I did know him. I always heard he left this land open for the folks that lived here in the ravine.

She nodded. -He left it so can’t nobody clear or build down here, so his children can’t let nobody do it, for some time.

— How long he make that for?

— He ask me how long did I think before everybody live down here be moved out into town. I said could be just ten year, could be twenty, thirty, or longer. Just depend on how much the younger folks likes it, or if they gets restless or not. He say, You think could be forty year, Vish? I said, May be, but I doubt it. Well, he say, just in case, and make it forty year. That was near about forty year ago, and now I’m the only one left down here. I figure any day the Case children gon get a judge to let them change the papers, tear it all down, if they remember to. She laughed. -With me goes the ravine, I speck. I speck they gon put another shopping center right here someday.

Finus looked at this old woman looking at him like she’d watch a snake.

— You ever help out Mrs. Birdie Urquhart, lives out on the Macon highway?

She considered that.

— No, sir, don’t believe I ever helped her out none.

— Did you ever know the woman worked for her, Creasie Anderson?

She didn’t answer for a minute, then, — Yes, sir, she from down here in the ravine. I raised her. But she ain’t lived here in a long time.

— How long she been gone?

— Moved out from here to the Urquharts’ when she was just a girl, many year ago.

— Did she keep a place back here?

— Yes, sir, had a place. Ain’t been back to it in a long time, though.

— When would you say was the last time she used her place here, then?

— Couldn’t say, I reckon. Ain’t seen her here in a long time.

Finus looked around at the other cabins.

— Which one was hers, then, you don’t mind my asking?

The old woman cut her eyes without moving her head to look at the other cabins.

— That old green one over there was hers.

Finus looked. One of the cabins was a flaked and faded dark green color.

— You reckon it’d be all right if I took a look around it?

After a moment the old woman nodded.

— I don’t reckon it make a whole lot of difference, she said. -She don’t never come back here no more.

— I appreciate your time, Finus said. -You take care, now.

— Yes, sir. Tell Dr. Heath I said good day.

— I will.

Mike following stiffly, Finus walked over to the green cabin and mounted its rickety porch. He pushed on the old plank door and it gave way to a cobwebbed and ratty single room that gave way itself to what looked like a tiny kitchen in the rear, where he could see the edge of an old wood stove there. In the main room there was just an old stuffed chair, torn about the arms and cushion and backrest and stained with water and whatever. A little table stood near it, bare. The walls were covered with what appeared to be faded Sunday comics pages, torn and stained and splotched with age and water damage. In the kitchen the stove was bare except for a rusted cast-iron pan sitting on one of the heating plates. There was an old metal sink with no faucets but with a drain that appeared to run out through the wall. Above the sink there was a single shelf on which sat a salt box folded in upon itself, shredded paper in a mound of something could have been once flour or cornmeal. A lard tin. A mason jar stood next to it, shrouded in cobwebs and dust. He leaned in close to it, something inside. A black and gnarled little knot of something, like a charred fist of an old monkey or something. Finus heard a huffing sound, Mike settling down on the floor beside him, old baleful eyes looking at nothing.

— Poor old Mike, Finus said, bending stiffly over himself to scratch the dog’s head. Mike’s eyes moved to him but otherwise he didn’t respond. Finus straightened up and looked at the jar again, took it off the shelf and wiped the cobwebs and dust away and peered closely at whatever it was inside there. Shriveled tendonish piece at either end, looked to have been severed away. He gently coaxed Mike up off the floor and led him outside. The old woman was still on her porch in her rocker. Seemed to be looking at nothing, just out through the woods. Finus stepped carefully down the steps of the porch and, Mike slowly and stiffly making his way beside him, walked back over and stood at the base of the porch steps.

— Sorry to trouble you again, Miss Vish, he said. -I just wanted to ask one more thing.

She nodded. Eyes cut just for a second to the jar he held in his hand.

— Yes, sir.

— I was asking Dr. Heath about poisons, ways folks might poison someone if they had a mind to do it.

She looked at him, even cocked her head just a fraction of an inch.

— Poisons? she said. Then an odd little movement ticked at the thin licorice twist of her mouth. The old lips opened a hair and something between an enervated laugh and a wheeze came out. -Naw, sir, she said then, don’t truck in no poisons.

— Say you don’t.

— No, sir, and her eyes went back to where they rested on something over his head across the tiny creek in the swampy woods. -No sir, she said again, managing an emphatic little movement of her head, the white straw and scarce hair there looking as if permanently blown and dried hard away from her face like a frost-driven shrub. -Poisons invented by the white folks. Black folks don’t need no poisons.

— Why’s that?

— Well, sir, she said, we got the white folks, poison enough. Then she bared her gums, gave that little wheezy laugh. -I reckon I can say that nowadays, cain’t I.

— I reckon you can say whatever you want to.

She nodded.

— Ain’t always been the case, she said.

Finus held the jar up a tad so the light caught it, seemed to be soaked up by the black gnarl inside it, a tiny black hole into which the fading afternoon light was sucked.

— You got any idea what this thing she was keeping on her shelf might be?

Old woman rocked once, using an old toe as black as the thing in the jar, about as gnarled, and seemed to regard the jar with her opaque eyes.

— I can’t see too good, she said.

— It’s just a mason jar. Got something in it I can’t tell what it is. It was on Creasie’s shelf, in the kitchen.

— Naw, sir, she finally said, drawing out the words. -Look to be some kind of old preserves, to me. Might be some old figs drawed up. Long past eating.

— I’ll bet you’re right on that.

— Might have something to eat inside, you hungry.

— Well, Finus said after a moment, I appreciate that. But I believe I’ll pass. He nodded by way of saying good day, made his way with hobbling old Mike back up the trail toward his truck.

A Lost Paradise

SHE HAD NEVER been naked in public in her life. She had been naked outdoors but not within sight of others aside from her friend Avis. Now it felt naked but not quite the same, though who’s to say since she never went outside naked, not out in the open air with no cover. This was not naked the same way, but she was getting used to it. And she wasn’t anymore like walking, but more like what you call flying in a dream, just sort of moving just ahead of some awareness of the body or of moving itself, an effortless here and there. She had no voice but a sound like a gentle wind rattling dry fall leaves. Once in a moment she was frightened by the shadowy presence of tangled live oak limbs all around her. Then she was near and among the presence of the little town of Silverhill down near the Alabama coast, and the pecan groves in between there and Fairhope, and then there was the bay and the sifting of breeze through the wings of a flock of gulls who seemed to see her and roll their beady eyes in her direction and nearly crash into one another in distraction. She held her long dark hair out of her eyes and gazed upon herself at that height and thought, Oh, I was beautiful, I look like, I don’t know. It was like the brief moment in her life between a child’s comfort in her own skin, and the burning new awareness of what she was to a man.

Here, the streets of Fairhope were like none of the streets when she was a child and they would visit — all these homes had sprung up since then, none of the old waterfront homes survived, long gone, she had long ago mourned them and now their own ghosts lay over the newer homes like veils, or mosquito netting. She skimmed through the old live oak tops on down to the Grand Hotel, the ghost of the original Point Clear Hotel itself now barely visible to her among the broad oak boughs and the steam coming from the ventilation pipes in the roof of its successor. None of the long galleries and the swings, though the promenade was the same. On the bay, on the water’s surface and out between two sunglint sailboats, a man leaning himself back out over the chop said hah! when his boat gave a tilt in her direction as she rose up to avoid a little wave. The man nearly fell out of his boat.

She spread her arms and legs and let the foamy tips of the chop skim into her navel, then deep into the water without the resistance to which she was accustomed, past the hulls of sunken fishing boats, the cracked beams of sailing vessels and the long bent and wrenched-off arms of hapless shrimp boats, the skeletal hulls of great tarpon resting in their long-quiet disgust, and automobiles, some she seemed to recognize from her youth, and she remembered the sinking of an early ferry taking travelers across to Mobile. She passed in through the rusted torpedo shaft of a submarine of which no one knew save those poor souls still locked inside, and drifted slowly past the stricken eyes of the crew boys who rode it to its death, and one said, Bless you, Miss Birdie, and she kissed his concave, whiskered cheek — he was all tears, in the briny deep. She left through the molecular lacunae of its old prop shaft and spinning blades. Seeing spindly legs ahead of her went to look, and circled with the speckled trout and a few lost snapper the beams of a natural gas derrick, and then swam away and left the water. Ahead of her lay the old fort. Through the decrepit buildings that were the captain’s quarters and the officers’ and enlisted men’s barracks, she came through cracked panes which gave her some dread, and along the floors where boards had pulled apart from one another in age and ill health, these buildings propped up with the crude buttresses of those who would preserve them, their galleries gone as if from faces had fallen their features, poor noses and teeth and jaw, exposing the yaw of the corpse. She was caressed by the cool, clipped grass of the lawn inside the fortress itself, seeming ancient but no older than her father were he still alive. She drifted through the dark archways and chambers and then back into the yard, paused at the bloodstain on the steps where she’d had her picture taken as a girl with her sisters, where some confederate had died and left his ineradicable mark in the mortar. She slipped over the lip of the gun bay for the old disappearing cannon, no longer there, but its ghost too still lingering, even steel leaving its shape somehow in the air, a lingering particulate shade, collecting itself in her honor, to swing up and out over the water, and she entered its bore and followed its sighting above the Gulf itself and kept going, the earth receding, and she thought she must keep going into the lighter air and nothingness, but was drawn back in a dreamlike shift from there to here, the old lighthouse, in the balmy air currents moving east along the peninsula. Over the old site of Palmetto Cove. She heard cries and went down. There were the general calls of the animals once native to the shore, the wild hogs descended from the pigs the soldiers let go when the fort was first shut down, and the older, indigenous bears and panthers and even the shy, retiring ivorybill. The glow from the treasure laid in by pirates and sought by everyone and never found now called to her from beneath cypress but she paid it no mind. There were pirates hanging a man from the hanging tree, and whipping others back into the water. But those cries she heard first now became apparent to her in the spirits of two young girls who drowned in the storm of ’06, huddled in the corner of a room in the house built by their father, who had earlier washed into the bay, their poor mother tumbled into a drowned thicket of scrub oaks whose dense branches held her by her clothing until the water rose and drowned her too. Soldiers would find their ravaged bodies in the trees in Bon Secour and would be ashamed at their own interest in the girls’ bawdy contortions, long dresses lifted and twisted about their heads like murderous turbans, their drawers torn and muddy. A soldier unable to contain himself would begin to cry, as the others stared and drifted in the tide, and then discovered another girl alive and hanging from the high branches by her long blond hair.

This was a paradise, once, Pappy said. There, he was with her again.

It’s all gone now. We had all our homes in here, you probably can’t see it.

Though she did, now, free as she was to see all that had been in her mind’s eye throughout her life, the little pine board homes with sheet tin roofs, and the smallish porches and wash sheds out back, the raked sand yards and the dogs roaming free and chasing off into the thickets after wild boar and deer. She remembered her grandmother once stepped out onto the front porch and shot a boar attacking their dogs, with a rifle she held seemed longer than she was. And all the homes separated by the dunes and the scrub oak thickets and some up on little hard dunes and the others nestled down into the flats between the shifting oblong mounds over which the children ran. And there were paths from there across the old fort road to the Gulf beach, and the children roamed them with the wildlife and stayed out of one another’s way, human and animal, with a kind of natural grace.

You have no memory of your own, of the storm, I expect.

I remember the sound of the wind, and of being cold and in the water, in the dark, and being cold on the little hill by the oak trees.

She felt a cool breeze and they were a memory of hands clapping, a singing around the fireplace in his old home down on the coast, here on the peninsula, before the storm that blew it away, when she and her mother and father still lived with him and her grandmother there, before Pud and Lucy were born, and she smelled the heavy salt air, felt the cool freshness of the white sand outside the open windows, and heard the breeze in the tops of the longleaf pines, and the old heartpine house timbers groaned.

See here it is again, Pappy said. The sand white as sugar, the dunes high as the tops of the pines, and the little live oaks and the sea oats on them rustling and swaying, the tops of the little oaks swept back like wild women standing facing the wind so that their hair is blown back and their faces beautifully ravaged by it, and the white sand blowing in the little drifts and ribbing the upside of the dunes and in gentle swells down the sides toward the bay, stitched with the milkwort, the backdune drifts filled with the yellow flowering partridge pea and cropped up you see these wax myrtles and cacti and the yaupon holly, this wild rosemary, and you see these little holes for the ghost crabs and the beach mice, and their tracks leading to and fro. There was life everywhere, it was full and teeming with life, and with joy. There was no locks on any of our doors, which people say but it was true, here, there was simply no one and nothing to fear here, we knew everyone else and we knew the whole world here. We ate and lived on what was here, we needed nothing much from the outside. The fish from the sea. We kept pigs and cattle, a kind of longhorn which would feed on the palmettos and ranged the woods. And there were deer, chickens. Some things would not grow well and we traded for those from inland, but most what we needed we kept or raised.

The floor of the little bay there was full of sweet oysters you could scoop up in your hands, and the wild ducks came in the fall and stayed all winter long, part of the Lord’s bounty. In the evenings in good weather the young people made fires of driftwood on the beach and gathered to sing songs and talk and to hunt for the sea turtles when the moon was full, and the ones in love would walk the sandy paths among the dunes. We had dances for them. It was an innocence.

We truly were a happy people. Some said they didn’t miss it after it was gone but I did, aye, I still do miss every leaf and little grain of sand. We were three generations here, going on four, and most of us bar pilots. We moved by water, every boy sailing small boats as easy as breathing, came natural to us. This is where we belonged, see. It was like being made to leave paradise and the only life we knew, when it was destroyed. But we couldn’t go back for the very land itself was washed away, nothing left. Wiped off the face of the earth. Nothing to do but find another life somewhere. That’s why we moved inland.

It almost seemed it was a punishment. Like we had grown proud and inward. You can have a little world of your own but you cannot be so proud that you shut out the rest of the world entirely. Cousins marrying, such as that. A taking advantage of the bounty, it seemed it was. I don’t know. A vague corruption, child. And then come the flood. It seemed like something terrible from the good book, to me.

The day before the storm it was raining hard and steady, and there was a blow. We watched it from the south beach and went home. Late in the evening there was a terrific crash in the sky, and a flash of light. We tried to go to the south beach again but had to take a rowboat where we’d walked earlier, the water was already so high. And by three or four in the morning it was blowing so hard the houses shook, and the water rushed beneath the houses, and the driftwood logs it carried bumped and crashed against the pilings and the floors.

Those who’d been back to the south beach later said the water had been like a great gray wall coming toward the shore, and it was all about us in that blackness later on. Not another flash of lightning, no more thunder, just a terrible roaring and howling of the wind. I and your father made our way to the Dixons’ next house down to see how they were faring, pulling our way by the limbs of strong shrubs and the smaller trees. And when we arrived there we could see a lantern light in their upper floor and their faces in the dormer windows, and as we approached their gallery the whole house gave way and floated into the bay like a doomed ship departing, their hands reaching out the windows for salvation where there was none.

We made straight back to the house and gathered you all up, and lashed ourselves together with rope, and when we stepped off the gallery we had to hold you above our heads as the water was then shoulder deep. There was an old longhorn there at the edge of the gallery and we held to his horns and drove him to the edge of the yard towards high ground, to the fence, where we let him go and he was washed away. We knocked down the fence to get to the little hill where there were four strong oak trees, and when we got there we lashed ourselves to them, and each to the other. And others arrived there in the storm, finding some way, and they lay flat on the ground, and clutched onto us, trying not not to be blown away by the wind. McCutcheon was struck in the face by a flying piece of driftwood and died there on the spot. Something struck me in the chest and your grandmother held me up as I was unconscious for a while, else I’d have drowned then as the water was for a while even up over the little hill itself.

We held on there through the night, and when dawn came the water had gone down some and the gale died a bit, though it was still strong. Still we found oranges lying about that had been knocked from trees in the grove, and we found potatoes there, and a single egg lying there, a single egg! On the ground. When the water had gone down a bit more we dug up fence posts that were miraculously dry and managed to make a fire and roast that egg and feed it to you and the other two young ones there with us. We found jars of preserves floating in a few inches of water in the kitchen and ate them from the jars with our fingers, they was the best thing we ever tasted. I’ll bet you remember that.

After the soldiers came in their rowboats to rescue us and take us to the fort, after the waters had finally subsided, we returned to search for the dead. But all we could find was the body of poor Agnes Drummond, whose children and husband were lost and not to be recovered, in the ruins of her home, her hair which had been beautiful and rich in color now a tangled gray and matted about her stricken face and shoulders.

And where our home had been there was nothing but a little body of water, a still pond, and the high dunes were gone save the one that saved us. And the only home of the dozen or more that had stood there was the little plank house John Keesler had built with his own hands, and it skewed and bent like a freak house at the fair, you couldn’t stand on its floors and keep your balance.

Some said we should find another place like this and rebuild, all together, those that survived, but we hadn’t the heart to do it, child. This place itself was gone, disappeared, wiped off the face of the earth, and we couldn’t help but see it as a sign that a time and place had ended and we should move on. That’s when the Bateses helped us move up to Mercury. And so it’s been, so it was.

If we have faltered as a family it is my fault, for letting the loss of this life I knew discourage me, so that I lost something of my sense of who we were, and I could not see life clearly from the new place that we came to live. I lived in confusion for some time, and was not wise as I should have been. If we had been here you never would have married Earl, though I think still he was not a bad man, he just had no vision, he plowed headlong into life like a man afraid, and I think most men are afraid. I cannot fault him for that for after we left here I knew some of that fear and lack of vision. It’s the age, it’s the way we live, it’s difficult to overcome. I lost faith for a time in the ability of God to lead us, to give us that vision. I closed my eyes to his sight, and lost mine own.

Nobody faulted you, Pappy.

It’s for no one else to do, Birdie. I fault myself. I don’t condemn myself. I was human, like anyone else.

Where are you going? she said to him then. He was walking down a twilit white sand trail into the dense pine woods east of the house. He only raised his hand and was lost in the grainy light there. She was tired. She was drifting herself with a northern breeze to the Gulf side where gentle waves flopped and crushed themselves against the sand stained wet and draining. Two ladies lay on towels on the beach nearly naked, their skin glistening with oil. They seemed strange and familiar, too, like people she’d once known in a dream, and forgotten. Birdie went down and lay down on sand between them. They were sleeping. She looked up toward the deck of the beach house behind them and a young boy stood there, looking at her. She waved. He merely stared at her, and so she approached him and was there before him in the buffeting Gulf breeze. He was not afraid. He knew her, somehow. He put out his hand, and when he touched where she was he gave a start, and she wanted to say, it’s only electricity, child, but she could not, and she rose away so that he would wonder for the rest of his life about the presence of this angel who visited him as he stood on a deck overlooking the Gulf of Mexico, when he was a just a boy.

Grievous Oscar

THERE WERE CARS everywhere, from the carport and down the driveways on both ends. Finus drove along the grass beside the driveway and parked by the sidewalk to the front door. But he chose to walk around back and go in the kitchen door, the familiar entrance, and avoid whoever might be playing gatekeeper at this event. Didn’t really want to talk to Birdie’s kinfolk or some righteous church woman full of baloney and saccharine goodwill. He went through the little archway between the carport and the kitchen door, opened the screen door, mounted the steps, and pushed open the stubborn door to the kitchen.

It was crowded, even in there, but at least those standing there were eating, occupied, and at best looked around with a chicken leg poised at their teeth and nodded, grinning at him, and kept eating. Howard Feckman did actually take a chicken wing from between his teeth a millimeter from biting in, set it down on the plate long enough to shake Finus’s hand, then picked up another piece and bit on into it. In spite of all the congregated living bodies, which hovered over and around the tables of food, Finus could see and take in the impressive spread: dishes of broccoli and cheese casseroles, French green bean and mushroom soup casserole, apple crunch desserts, a coconut cake, several crusty pound cakes, large plates of cold fried chicken covered with plastic wrap, a massive ham, the cooling meat drawing up around a shank bone big as a severed sapling. Large aluminum pitchers of ice tea frosted with sweat, ice tinkling in tumblers as the tea was poured in. Sweet potato pudding with melted marshmallow topping. Dishes of snap beans cooked down and dark, sweet, and tartish. Baked squash with onion, soft as pudding. And tall slim sweating steel crankbuckets of homemade ice cream, vanilla and fresh peach, beside at least a dozen pies: glazed pecan, lemon icebox, sweet potato, custard, apple, chess, and what looked like a blackberry cobbler. The din from conversation and eating was considerable, almost made him smile.

He felt someone brush his elbow then and saw old Creasie standing there, eyes limpid and tired-looking, looking up at him. She wore a pretty pink dress with a clover print on it, and Finus was fairly sure it had been Birdie’s once.

— Hello, Mr. Finus, she said to him.

— Hello, Creasie, he said. Finus wondered where this old woman would go now, what she would do. Maybe she had family somewhere, he had no idea. He wanted to ask her, but he didn’t think he had the energy to listen, and he was certain she didn’t much have the energy or will to tell him everything she could tell him. Same space, different worlds.

— Missed you at the services, Mr. Finus, she said then.

— Yeah, he said. -I wasn’t feeling too well.

— Yes, sir. Better get yourself a plate, then, Creasie said. She reached over to the counter and got him a plate and some silverware. He took it from her hands, dark and weathered on the backs, light-colored in the palms.

— Thank you, Creasie, he said. -I believe I’m about to starve to death.

He got a plate and put some chicken, beans, squash casserole on it, and came back over by the sink and Creasie to eat it. He set the empty plate in the sink.

— You was hungry, she said.

They looked at one another for a minute.

— I was out to your old house in the ravine today.

She looked up at him as if not understanding his words for a second.

— Yes, sir, you was? What in the world was you doing way out there?

— Just exploring, I guess, he said. She nodded. -Had a conversation with old Vish out there. Was talking to Parnell Grimes yesterday, said some curious things, then Dr. Heath said I might talk to Vish about them.

— Miss Vish still alive, then, Creasie said. She nodded to herself and walked over to the sink and stacked a few small dishes in there. Finus followed her.

— I took the liberty of looking around your old place, he said. -Hope you don’t mind.

— Umm, hmm, no sir, she said, running some water over the dishes and turning off the faucet, drying her fingers on the apron she wore over the skirt of her dress. -I don’t never go out there no more.

— I was just curious, Finus said then, if you could tell me what is in that old mason jar in your kitchen. Strange-looking thing, aroused my curiosity.

She looked out the window, working at the snuff in her bottom lip for a second, then her eyes cut over at him.

— Yes, sir, what kind of old jar was it, now.

— A tall kind of mason jar, had some thing in it I can’t even tell what it was. She was holding his eye then. -You know what I’m talking about then?

She nodded. Her attention seemed to wander a little and she sagged a little more in the shoulders.

— Fact, I got it out in the truck, if you’d like to see it, jog your memory.

She nodded again.

— I’ll tell you, Mr. Finus. That was a long time ago. She stood there a long minute, seeming to think about something. -Yes, sir, I can tell you the story behind that jar, you help me do something here.

— All right, he said.

— You got a minute, then?

He nodded.

— Yes, sir, come on with me.

— Outside?

She nodded, motioning him to follow her. They went out the kitchen door, down the steps to the archway, and across the drive in front of the carport to the old shed out by the pumphouse. He followed her up to a door cut into the sheet metal siding, which was fastened to with an old hasp lock. Creasie reached up and shook the lock once, dropped it.

— I need to get in here for something.

— Do you not have the key?

— No, sir. Don’t nobody know where the key to this old shed is. I didn’t want to bust in there. You reckon it’s all right to bust in, now?

She nodded toward the carport. -They’s some tools in there back by the deep freeze, might be something that would work there.

He found a rusty-hinged toolbox and in the top tray a short crowbar, and brought that back over. He jammed the flat end behind the hasp lever and yanked and pried until the screws came out of the old wood, and the door swung free. He took hold of it and opened it wide, revealing a packed dirt floor with an old cylinder lawn mower and rusted child’s wagon there, and shelves beginning chest high on which sat blackened hand tools and moldered collapsed cardboard boxes and wooden boxes topped with miscellaneous junk. On the shelf to their left sat a cobwebbed and rotten-clothed bizarre thing, a dummy of some kind with minstrel features, faded red lips and yellowed teeth and yellowed eye-whites, gazing at the space where the door now stood open, just over their heads. It almost made Finus jump.

— What in the hell is that thing? he said.

Creasie was standing there staring at it, something about her of the bereaved.

— Nothing but an old nigger dummy, Mr. Finus. What everybody done forgot about but me.

Finus Infinitus

HE SKIPPED THE council meeting that evening, sat at the kitchen table and sipped from a bourbon and water, and looked at the blackened heart inside the jar he’d set down beside his glass. He wasn’t hungry after the plate of food out at Birdie’s.

After staring at the telephone a while, he picked it up, called the press that printed the Comet, and told them not to run Birdie’s obituary.

— Just pull it, he said. -I’ll run it next week.

He took his drink into the living room, thought about turning on the television for late-night crap and decided not to. Mike shambled creakily in and humphed himself to the floor at his feet with a wheeze. About midnight he woke up with his neck in a crick from leaning it back on the sofa in sleep. Mike snored gently on the floor. He sat there awhile working his neck with his fingers, feeling tired to the marrow and last drop of old blood. Then he got up slowly, careful not to wake old Mike, and went down the stairs to the street and got into his pickup. He laid the jar from Creasie’s house on the seat beside him and drove through town past the orphans’ home and turned in at the cemetery, lights off, around to where he knew Earl Urquhart’s grave was.

Wasn’t hard to find, with the earth in a mound over Birdie’s fresh grave. The air was cooler, though there was little breeze. Finus took the jar and walked over to the graves, not sure what he intended to do. But there lying beside Birdie’s grave was a shovel, apparently left there by one of the gravediggers.

He read the stone. Earl Leroy Urquhart, 1899–1955.

— Well, old Earl, Finus said, I don’t mean this as a desecration. Just a restoration, of sorts. If it’s just an old pig’s foot, I’m sorry, no disrespect intended.

He took the shovel and made four neat incisions in the turf at what he figured about chest level for the body of Earl down deep, and lifted it carefully and set it aside. Then he dug enough earth out to place the jar a foot or so deep in the hole. He replaced the dirt, packing it down with the sole of his Red Wing, leveled it, then knelt and placed the piece of turf back on top of it, pressing it and shaping it until as best he could tell the surgery wouldn’t be too obvious.

He stood up, brushed his hands off on his pants, knocked the dirt off his boots with the shovel, and laid the shovel back down next to the mound of Birdie’s earth where he’d found it. Stood there catching his breath. For the first time in his life he seemed to feel every one of his true and earthly years. Maybe it’s coming my time, he thought, where my time here and the way I feel about it have come together and will take me out of this light and into another, or eternal darkness. He figured he could take it either way, wouldn’t make much difference to the man he was here and now. That would be that and then, not this and now. He looked about. Down behind him in the area where he had used to park and rut with Merry Urquhart now there were neat lines of headstones just as there were in every other part of the cemetery, the place was about filled up. He looked up. The night was clear, and the nearly full moon he hadn’t noticed but had worked by stood high above the magnolia trees at the cemetery’s summit, between Finus and the dim penumbra of the lights in town. He heard something and saw it moving toward him along the narrow paved pathway from the street. Some kind of dog trotting along, veered away from him and through the stones between him and the magnolias and stopped there when it saw him watching it. It stood stock still, sideways, head turned his way, to see what he was going to do.

Finus stood stock still, too. It looked just like the dog in his death dream, the one he’d told Birdie about, charged with guarding his body while he slept. Though it was clear the dog didn’t know him and feared him. A guilty, negligent dog.

— Hey! Finus called to it. The dog twitched but didn’t run. Both stood still watching the other. Then after a minute or so the dog seemed to relax. He looked away from Finus, looked around the cemetery, feigning a casual manner, sniffed the grass at his feet, as if something interesting there had caught his attention for a second. It was a transparent attempt to look innocent. He looked back at Finus, as if Finus had said something else. He hadn’t. Then the dog trotted on his way, weaving around headstones, crossed the gravel path at the crest of the hill and disappeared over it down into the lower parts of the cemetery out of sight. Finus watched him go. His heart was racing. When it calmed he looked around at where he was, at Birdie’s grave, at Earl’s stone, at the other stones shining dully in the moonlight, at his truck waiting stunned or suspended, incomplete without him.

HE SLEPT TILL two o’clock the next afternoon, took his time rousing, and went into the office at four, and finished rewriting her obituary early that evening. He took out the addendum about the poisoning, and inserted three new bulleted items:

She was the best at making a little gumball out of sweet-gum sap of anyone yours truly has ever known.

She developed later in life the ability to suck in her cheeks and make her lips into a funny little narrow pucker, made her look like a little mouse nibbling something, real comical, made all the children laugh.

She once at age eighty speared an actual mouse using one of those sticks with a nail in the end of it, used for picking up paper trash, disgusted that everyone else had been too squeamish.

He put the copy in Lovie’s basket, then put his overnight bag in the truck and helped Mike get up into the passenger seat. He filled the tank at the Shell station on the highway just south of town, then headed up the long hill that was the south ridge and rolled along the general decline to the Gulf coast.

It was a route he’d known since a small boy, though the roads had changed, improved. His grandfather accompanied them to the fort at the end of the peninsula, down on the Alabama Gulf coast, for dinner with the Commandant. His grandfather knew the Commandant, from the Spanish-American War. They ate by flickering lantern and candle light. Out the open, screened window, gentle summer waves flopped and crushed on the sand. Finus sat quietly as after dinner the grown-ups drank from small bowled glasses and his father and the Commandant smoked cigars that his grandfather leaned over and whispered to him came from Cuba.

— Go to the south window, Finus, and see if you can see the lights of Cuba.

He’d smirked at his grandfather, who knew he was too smart for that. His grandfather was big and open-faced, a bald and friendly giant, and his touch was gentle on Finus’s shoulders and on his back, and when he tousled Finus’s light brown hair. His parents were dressed in their best clothes, though he could not see his mother, she was eternally just at the edge of his eye. He was in his worsted wool suit, and the Commandant wore his dress jacket with the high collar and stars. The Commandant was a bachelor and had hired a Creole cook whose head at what seemed regular intervals appeared from behind the swinging door to the kitchen to look at him with oddly green eyes in her coppery face, and then disappeared again. The food was wonderful, fish in a sack, gumbo, fried grouper, bright white scallions like pearls with long green stalks, and boiled new potatoes so small and sweet they didn’t even need butter. The Commandant gave him a very small measure of red wine. The others raised their glasses to him, love and admiration in their eyes.

HIS GRANDFATHER TOOK him just before dawn on horseback down the beach and turned in through a pass in the dunes toward the old lagoon. They rode around the lagoon and down a trail into the thick brush and piney woods and dismounted in a little clearing on the trail and tied the horse to a bush. Fragrant with citronella his grandfather had rubbed onto their faces and necks and hands, they made their way slowly in a cloud of mosquitoes, yellow flies buzzing fiercely about. It was first light, now, dawn seeping into the air. There were thick patches of saw palmetto they made their way around, stepping on hummocks of spongy ground around marshy spots. The faint blue light seeming to emanate from the little rounded clumps of needled branches at the tops of the pines. There were dense and compact water oaks draped with moss that in this light seemed gauzy veils hung from the arms of great skeletal ghosts. They came to the edge of a clearing smoked with low-hanging fog and haunted with gaunt old giants, suffering ancient leafless oaks and tall crooked poles that were once grand pines, and here his grandfather motioned for him to sit beside him on the grass and to be quiet. All else was quiet. The low fog moved almost imperceptibly within itself, a slow swirling with what breeze made its way into the swamp through the scrub thickets and saw grass and younger pines toward the water.

The birds had begun their singing and their calls, a tuning up of the world, and he began to see them dipping through the fog of the clearing from one part of the woods to another. Crows called from far off. He could hear the rooster doves lamenting. His grandfather touched his hand and motioned with his eyes to one of the old dead oaks, high up, and he looked in time to see a huge bird, its rakish red crest thrust from a hole there, and then the bird launched itself and flew high across the clearing in a loping manner, its body black but for the scarlet head and large painted patches of pure white on the wings, calling in a strange, strong but small-for-its-size-sounding kent, kent, like a piercing loud toy horn, and was gone in the mist. Then another bird, minus the crest but with the strong white slashes on its black wings and on its breast, followed, with the same call. And the woods seemed silent again after that, all other birds diminished to relative silence.

— That’s the ivorybill, his grandfather said then. -Almost gone from this world. You should not ever forget it, Finus. You may not ever see them again.

He wouldn’t. The big storm would wash the hotel away, his grandfather would die just two years later, and for some time his family did not go to the beach. Did he know this somehow, the vision of a child? He thought of the birds again as a teenager and tried for some time to find the spot. And when he finally did, after three early-morning attempts, and sat there the next dawn, he saw nothing but songbirds and crows. It was a part of the world that was gone for Finus, as was his grandfather.

— They’re a shy bird, see, the old man had said. -Don’t like people. And they need lots of woods, lots of old dead trees like this one around. They rip the old bark off and eat the grubs out of there. And when people cut down the woods and grow new trees, it takes too long for old dead trees to come around again, and the birds have nowhere to go. They need no one else but themselves. They don’t need the company of other birds, other animals. They’re a solitary race of bird.

— Like you and me, Finus said.

The old man looked at him and laid a hand on his tangly brown hair.

— Ah, he said, you’re too young for that, Finny. But you may be right. He smiled at him. -Don’t be too hard on yourself, now. Don’t be so hard to get along with.

— I’m not.

— No, you’re easygoing. But you are a loner, aren’t you?

— I like to be alone.

— I see it, his grandfather said. -It’s too bad, but it’s not so bad, after all. Just don’t turn away from people so quick. Give them a long look, don’t close up your heart, now.

— All right.

— An open heart will save you, but you have to be smart, too. You have to be careful who you open your heart to. Some people can’t help but hurt you if they know it, he said, and kissed the young Finus on his forehead.

HE GOT THERE at midnight and found his key to the old cabin and climbed the creaking sand-blown steps to the shaky deck and let himself in and lay down right away in the main room. He and Mike slept together in one of the daybeds and while he slept the ghosts of those whose lives left some parts of themselves there visited him and laid their soft and fog-drifted hands upon him. They passed into him some of the energy that always generated within them but which they could never contain and gather to take shape in the world as they’d known it. He woke in the faint light and gull-calling of dawn. The air in the cabin was suffused with age, he hadn’t been down there in decades. One front window was broken out, the glass on the dry wooden floor beneath it. A pair of beach sparrows flitted in and out of the window to a nest hole in the corner ceiling. He went over to the refrigerator, which was somehow miraculously humming. Inside he found two cold ancient Schlitz cans and drank one straight off, and carried the other with him out to the truck.

He and Mike made their way carefully down the deck steps and to the truck, and he drove down to what he thought was the old path road to the Palmetto Cove site, bulling through a couple of deep sandy spots and crashing through some low pine limbs until he broke out right at the bay shore and had to slam on the truck’s brakes to keep from tipping into the water. When he stepped out there was a good breeze blowing from the north, and a good thing because otherwise he realized he’d have been attacked by yellow flies and mosquitoes and had brought nothing to protect himself from them.

He took off his shoes and socks and rolled his pants up and waded a few feet out into the bay and leaned over and began scooping at the sand of the bay until he came up with a good-sized oyster in each hand. He tossed them onto the bank where he’d stepped in and where Mike lay watching him. Mike sniffed the oysters and lay back down. Finus kept scooping till he had something like a dozen big bay oysters, then he waded back in and sat on the bank and opened them with the short blade of his pocket knife and ate them from the shell, drinking the salty water that clung to the oysters’ edges. He drank the second Schlitz from the refrigerator, tossing the old tab top into the back of the truck from where he sat. The strong breeze cooled him and he felt so tired he had to lie down awhile. He fell asleep, lying there.

In his dream he was first with his father and mother and grandfather again at the Commandant’s house down at the fort, and they were all around the table and happy. They toasted one another, and Finus was grown up in his mind in the dream but also still a little boy. He loved them so much. Some part of him was not just himself but was Eric, also, and he was so happy to have Eric within him and did not question how such a thing could be. The Creole cook was in the dream but he could not see her, and she was also Creasie, and he was aware of Birdie’s presence somehow though he was not sure how, and he wanted to leave the table to see where she was but he also didn’t want to leave such good company, but then he did and when he wandered out of doors it was not nighttime anymore, but a cool and sunny fall afternoon.

He wandered toward a spot of color in the distance and when he got close he saw that it was a bush filled with preening monarch butterflies, migrated there from South America, resting and soaking up the sunlight. He lay on the sand and looked up at them. They were like the leaves of the shrub, they were so numerous. They seemed to shiver under his rapt attention. He felt such an outpouring of love for them, he thought he would weep. They seemed hardly able to contain their delight that he was gazing upon their beautiful wings.