The Heaven of Mercury

by Brad Watson

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

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

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

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

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

  Finus nodded. -Miss Birdie, he said.

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

  -Morning, Finus said.

  -Finus.

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

  -What you into today? Pearly said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Finus grunted, sipped his coffee.

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

  Finus slowly turned on his stool and stared at Pearly.

  -Say what, now?

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

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

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

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

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

  Pearly looked back at him, winged eyebrows in flight.

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

  -You can skip this one, Pearly said.

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

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

  -Who you got, Lovie?

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

  -What’s on Mrs. Chambliss’s mind?

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

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

  -I guess we’ll see about that.

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

  -I guess we’ll see.

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

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

  MIDFIELD WAGNER, 68

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  She made a little flick of her slim speckled wrist.

  -Say that was in Indiana, Lovie?

  She looked at him a second, mouth cocked.

  -Michigan.

  -Oh, yeah.

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

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

  -Ah, poor thing.

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

  -What? she said.

  -You inspire me, Lovie.

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

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

  Finus bent again to his more formidable machine.

  BIRDIE WELLS URQUHART, 88

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  But to take another angle. Or addendum:

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

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

  Imagine it in letters of motley colors, odd sizes.

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