The Heaven of Mercury by Brad Watson

Author:Brad Watson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2002-08-23T04:00:00+00:00

II

Her Remembrance of Awakened Birds

CARS CLACKITY-CLACKING by out on the old highway, tires slapping the tar dividers, always put her to sleep, and Earl, it would wake him up in the middle of the night, he’d have to get up and go in the kitchen, make a pot of coffee and smoke before coming back to bed. His heart racing. The man had to be going all-out even sleeping, when he could sleep. It was all that, killed him. They could say all they wanted about her but it was that what killed him, cigarettes and no rest and womanizing, and work all the time, and just that temper, all pent up and not enough chances to steam it out. She gave him every chance she could and then some, let him rant and rave all he wanted, but it wasn’t enough. The man had plenty of poison in his own glands, keeping that backed up in him for want of putting it into her, but it just wasn’t in her to do that all the time, rutting away like he wanted, and she reckoned he didn’t let it build up too much, with Ann and all the girls at the store as wanton and willing vessels.

The old mockingbird with the nest in the camellia was singing in through the window screen again. She’d had Finus’s radio show on earlier though she missed whatever he’d said about her, he’d said he was going to say something and she’d said not to tell people she was out here about to die, they’d come and wear her out visiting and kill her for sure, and she didn’t want to go that way, with people all around gawking. But when she turned on the radio and heard Finus that bird was out there, cocking his head, and when she turned him off in a little bit sounded like the bird was mocking Finus, singing a waw-waw-waw song made her laugh out loud, it had to be Finus’s old sawing drawl he was after. She wondered sometimes if that crazy bird wasn’t mocking her, nobody knew better than she did how she yammered on, when she was feeling good anyway, when she was on the telephone, talk talk talk, and suddenly in the middle of yapping-on hear that bird trilling some loud funny song didn’t sound like any other bird, and she’d think My lands, that’s me!

Now there he was, bouncing on that little camellia branch and cocking his head in and making some rrrack! rickety sound like a crow.

Out back of the house the old junk cars from her son-in-law’s junklot across the road had accumulated over the years, spreading into her back lot where there was once just the little field laced with honeysuckle and hanging oak boughs and Creasie’s cabin—now fallen in on itself and vines—gathering like the empty husks of giant cicadas, all through the ruined apple orchard. She used to make the best pies of those tart green and brown speckled apples.

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