The Heaven of Mercury

by Brad Watson

  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.

  * * *

  THE HEAVEN OF MERCURY

  Brad Watson

  READING GROUP GUIDE

  PHOTOGRAPH OF MY GRANDMOTHER

  My maternal grandmother, Margaret Maria (Maggie) Wells Watson, known to her grandchildren as Mimi, was married at sixteen—too young to know any better, according to her lights. My grandfather, a determined and persuasive young shoe salesman, had almost bullied her into marrying him, she said. A year into the marriage, this girl, who’d never been more than kissed on the cheek before her wedding night, was pregnant with her first child, my aunt Marjory. Mimi used to say her childhood just vanished.

  I was always fascinated by Mimi, who lived to be ninety-three, and her hilarious stories. She told them in a disjointed, lighthearted, rambling fashion, punctuating them with gems such as the time I asked how she felt about my grandfather’s infidelity (like his father, apparently, he got around), and she replied, “Well, it hurt, you know. But at least it kept him off of me.”

  She hadn’t really wanted to marry at all, didn’t want to have children, not as young as she did, anyway. She couldn’t stand the Watsons, her in-laws. Earl’s father, an insurance salesman, was a reputed womanizer who’d killed his brother-in-law in a fight many years past; he spent two years in the penitentiary for manslaughter. He carried a little pearl-handled pistol in his jacket pocket until the day he died. Earl’s siblings were always envious of him, especially his brother Klein, with whom Earl fought all the time, sometimes in the house. Mimi said Klein would storm in, raging, and Earl would leap up from the table, and they’d be whaling at each other in the living room. Her sisters-in-law were catty to her and insulted her all the time, took advantage of her, disparaged her character behind her back. According to Mimi, she was plagued by these people. Sometime late in her life, Earl’s sister Myrtle wrote a novel (unpublished), a good portion of which was devoted to disparaging her sister-in-law, Mimi.

  When Earl died of a heart attack in 1955, he left a wholly dependent wife who’d never worked a job, and a son (my father) he hadn’t bothered to teach the business. Then someone began to mail her letters made of words cut from magazine headlines, accusing her of poisoning Earl. The letters threatened an exhumation and autopsy. “THE TRUTH WILL OUT!” one said. Mimi knew these letters came from Klein and his wife because Klein was furious that Earl hadn’t left him a share in his two shoe stores. She was traumatized and embarrassed by these things, but nothing ever came of them. “Well, you know they’re just crazy, Maggie!” her friends would say.

  Only after Mimi’s death in 1995 did I see this photograph, taken sometime in the mid-to late 1920s. I was trying to begin work on a novel that would become The Heaven of Mercury, and I had a vague idea that my grandmother could be the model for a main character, Birdie Wells Urquhart. But the book gave me fits, and I wrote the rough drafts of two other books in the meantime, just trying to avoid this one. I was finding it almost impossible to invent a story about someone who had been such a strong presence in my life, and so much herself, as an old person. I struggled to see her as a girl, flirting with boys, being desired by boys and men. This photograph, showing my grandmother in something like a flapper’s dress, looking quite flirtatious as she leans coyly against the fancy car (no doubt my grandfather’s—he had a weakness for new automobiles), allowed something of her old lady veneer to crack a little, and I began to imagine her life in a way I hadn’t been able to before. And I began to weave some of her stories into a narrative, to elaborate upon them, and to invent others.

  I also began more freely inventing things about characters based on other people in her life. I knew little about Mimi’s housemaid of some fifty years, Velma Hubbard, but the woman was very sweet and kind, generous of spirit, and very rooted in the old ways of the racist South; I never could get her to stop calling me Mr. Brad. She and my grandmother were always arguing, bickering over little household things—they both got cantankerous in their old age. My grandmother fired Velma several times; Velma would simply let herself in the next morning with her key.

  The character invented to become Birdie Urquhart’s unrequited lover (Finus Bates) in the novel has no model, aside from sharing certain crotchety characteristics with me (I am not such an old man but act like one). So I was surprised when, after the book was done, my mother said there was a man who used to visit Mimi, and who cared enough about her to sit by her bedside when she was ill with various ailments. Mom didn’t know if the man was in love with Mimi or not, but she wondered, even suspected he was. I was astounded: It almost seemed like life imitating fiction.

  I don’t think Mimi would mind my using her life as inspiration for a novel. She might tell me I got some things wrong, but she’d understand I was making those things up. She’d say she didn’t want the facts, they were so awful, or that things weren’t really so awful as that. Most likely she’d just repeat what she said after reading my first published story, when I was twenty-three: “Well, I know you’re a good boy, anyway.” Meaning in spite of the awful things I wrote.

  Q & A WITH BRAD WATSON

  Where, or what, is “The Heaven of Mercury”?

  The title of the novel comes from Dante’s Divine Comedy, in “Paradiso.” I’m no Dante scholar, and I don’t know the “Purgatorio” or “Paradiso” books as well as I know “Inferno,” and I don’t know it as well as I used to. But early on in writing this book, when I was working with the idea of communion between the living and the dead, it occurred to me that Dante could be a model of sorts. Reading the books again I came across “The Heaven of Mercury” in “Paradiso” I thought it a lovely and fitting title for my story, and as it had to do with betrayal, all the better. The parallels, as it turned out, are a little vague, though Finus Bates is guided, in a sense, by Birdie Urquhart’s spirit in his searc
h for answers.

  It’s also everywhere in the book. In the characters’ minds, their memories, in the presence of the dead in their waking and dreaming lives, in their communion with spirits, real or imagined, and in their ability to survive grief, loss, and rage with dignity and compassion for one another—for the most part. It is in a sense a real heaven, where those dead wander, which is near, what the character Finus Bates describes as their “presence in distorted slips of air that revealed, like the thin and vertical flaws in a lens, the always nearby regions of the dead.”

  Is Mercury a real place, or a mythic one, like Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpa County?

  I don’t want to compare myself to Faulkner, but Mercury is like Yoknapatawpa in the sense that it is modeled after my hometown, Meridian, Mississippi, with many liberties taken. Mythic to the degree that certain elements are broadened or simplified, yes.

  Your descriptions of Mercury cover the better part of a century—from about 1906 to 1989. How have times changed or not changed in that kind of Southern town?

  They’ve changed a lot, even though in appearance many small Southern cities and towns seem not to have changed much. Demographics, economics, social cauldrons, these have all been modified by changes from the civil rights movements to increasing urbanization and the death of small farms, and the move away from cheap-labor manufacturing (it’s moved on to more fertile fields in developing countries).