The Heaven of Mercury

by Brad Watson

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

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

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

  -I know, Birdie said softly.

  -Well what happened, then, her mother whispered.

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

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

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

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

  -My feet sweat me sometimes, he said.

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

  He finished undressing, she looked away, then peeked.

  -My lands!

  -What?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  And something else, just the hint.

  -Is that your feet, still?

  -Well hell, he said, I washed them.

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

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

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

  Aunt Vish

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  -You take my sack, she said to Creasie.

  -Yes’m.

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

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

  -Yes’m.

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

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

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

  -Is that the baby?

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

  -Mmm hmm.

  -Is it dead?

  -It’s dead.

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

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

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

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

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

  -I don’t. I expect she might.

  In a minute, looking at the bundle.

  -Can I look at the baby, Aunt Vish?

  -No.

  They rode on.

  -Is its eyes closed or open?

  -Who? What you talking about, child?

  -The baby.

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

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

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

  -How come we taking the baby with us?

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

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

  -Take these in to Dr. Heath.

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

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

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

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

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

  -You wait here with the wagon.

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

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

  Vish said nothing for a moment.

  -Something like that, she said.

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

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

  She nodded.

  -Thank you.

  Thinking of what she might buy.

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

  Vish was looking at her.

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

  -Yes’m.

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

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

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

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

  Birdicus Urquhartimus

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

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

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

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