The Heaven of Mercury

by Brad Watson

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  -I won’t.

  -Do you see a jellyfish?

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

  -Pop!

  -Just kidding.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Avis said, very deliberately, -Go to hell.

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

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

  Negro Electric

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  -Waving?

  -He’s an electric nigra, Birdie.

  -A what?

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

  -Like how?

  He showed her.

  -That doesn’t look like waving to me.

  He just looked at her.

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

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

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

  -Say what, now? You and who?

  -Me and the children.

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

  -What do you mean, talk to it?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Which she repeated when he got home.

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

  -Well thank goodness for that.

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

  -I’m glad to be rid of it.

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

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

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

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