Birdie got up and went inside, left her out on the porch. Ruthie was asleep in their room. She picked up the moldy old book she’d found on the shelf in the foyer downstairs, Extraordinary Popular Delusions, and opened it to her mark in the chapter called “The Slow Poisoners,” all about how way back in England and Italy and whatnot people had discovered how to kill a body slowly with different poisons. They’d started to use it on their enemies, until it became so common in Italy for a while the story said a woman wouldn’t think any more of doing it to a lover or husband than someone would to file a lawsuit today. It was interesting to her because Pappy had grown hemlock in his garden and told her about how people used to use it for poison in this wickedness or that, he’d been fascinated with it.
In the book she found, it was mostly women who did it. One old woman in Italy was like the queen of the poisoners, saw it as helping out poor women who had no other recourse. It was horrible, but funny too, and she had fantasized about doing something like that to old Junius, and watching him get more and more poorly until his skin boiled over and his eyes popped out. She laughed out loud, almost woke up Ruthie sleeping beside her on the bed. But the longer she was forced to stay there alone, Earl on the road, the more miserable she was, and scared of Junius, too. She wanted to tell on him, but if she did Earl would kill him. Mrs. Urquhart wouldn’t be able to believe him capable of such a thing, anyway, in spite of his reputation and her tending to see evil and wickedness all around her. Birdie knew that for Mrs. Urquhart, evil was everywhere but remote, surrounding her and hers like a siege held off only by the force of her constant prayers, muttered under her breath every second of the day she wasn’t gabbing aloud about one thing or another. It would be Birdie who seemed evil to her, coming out with such a wild story. She decided she had to get out of there before things got worse.
When Earl came home the next weekend she didn’t give him an explanation or a choice. Just said, — Either you move us out of here of I’m going home to my family. So they moved to a little apartment on Southside on a day when the dogwoods were ending their bloom, and their white withering petals were strewn across the yards surrounding downtown. A flock of cedar waxwings like a rustling visible yellow-brown gust of a breeze rushed over their heads and into a chinaberry tree beside the Urquharts’ porch, then out the other side red-flecked before the last one entered, a breeze delayed or caught in the branches and swirling on its way. And they were gone, she and Earl and Ruthie, from that house. She kept the bad blood to herself, though Earl knew something vaguely of it, and they didn’t speak of it for some time.
After that it was easier, when he was away, because she’d fetch Pud and Lucy and bring them to town to stay with her, and run them back and forth to school in Earl’s car, and would bring Mama in sometimes, too. And Sundays they’d go out there and make a big Sunday dinner so Mama and Papa could see little Ruthie and she, Birdie, could walk with Pappy in the garden and hear his wonderful awful stories.
Earl would be gone for months at a time. It was like she wasn’t married, or maybe a widow already, such long nights ticking by in the lamplight, Ruthie sleeping, Pud and Lucy gone home. Here she was married, and pretty much alone. When he came back, she did her best to make it seem a good home, and to show him she appreciated him, though it seemed he had a hard time readjusting to being there, himself. She had the idea he was more comfortable with himself out on the road or working alone in the city.
Finally, though, Earl got the chance to open his own store in Mercury, and he bought them a little house just outside of town on the old Macon highway. It stood right across the road from where he’d build the big house with the deep front property during the war. One night in early June, the end of a hot day, they’d taken cool baths and lay in the bed with an oscillating fan blowing back and forth over them, and didn’t talk for a while, just lay there. There was a big honeysuckle bush between their house and the one next door, and the sweet smell of it drifted in the window, and for the first time ever she let Earl know, instead of him letting her know, that she wanted him. He turned on his side in the faint light and soon she could see his handsome eyes just looking at her. His coming home for good, and making them a real home, had tendered her toward him. They’d grown ever more remote during his years on the road. She touched him. Something about the way it happened — he was so gentle, and took his time, and maybe for the first time it felt as natural as could be, their being together like that. She forgot the night outside, Ruthie snoring childlike in her room, and the scent of the honeysuckles became something else not-honeysuckle, just became something all through the moment, and she cried out softly. It made Earl cry after, just silent tears she could see in that faint light, a glistening. -I love you, Birdie, with all my heart, he said, and wept, and she held him in her arms until they both fell asleep.
She’d thought he’d been so happy and relieved that it made him cry. But later she’d think it must’ve been guilt and shame. That he must’ve gotten started with other women when he was on the road, and had a whole history of passion that’d had nothing to do with her. That, in this way, he had already left her far behind.
She blamed herself, as much as him. He’d never had any real love around his house, no tenderness, not like her when she was growing up. One day not long after that evening, she went into town, caught a ride with Hazel Broughton in her new little coupe, and went into the store and all the girls looked up like she was a robber come in with a gun. She said, — Where’s Earl? No one said anything. -He’s up checking stock, one of them — a girl named Arlenie — finally said, and fairly rushed up the stairs. In a few minutes here comes Earl down, and when she kissed him she smelled a kind of perfume on him, a scent she’d smelled in the store before. She said nothing, just looked at him, and he looked away, said, — Well it’s real busy today, I’d better get to it, I need to work on some orders, and went into the office and left her standing there, all the girls avoiding her eyes.
— Where’s Cinda? Birdie said then, of the girl she knew he’d hired not a month before.
Another long silence. Then Arlenie, again, mustering a smile, says, — Oh, she took a late lunch, I think.
And Birdie didn’t say a word after that, just left and walked in a kind of blindness all the way to the library and stood there in front of the main doors until someone spoke to her. It was Finus Bates, standing there smiling a kind of fond, ironic smile at her, his expression changing when he saw the way she looked at him.
— Birdie, he said, reaching out to touch her shoulder, leaning toward her just a bit. -Are you all right?
She felt a little chill go through her, and stepped back. She was carrying Edsel, almost two months along. She hadn’t quite found the right time, just yet, to tell Earl.
She nodded at Finus, standing there perplexed, and started back toward Woolworth’s.
— Birdie? she heard Finus call out after her.
She was supposed to meet Hazel there for coffee. And then Hazel would drive her back out to the house, so she could start cooking, and have a decent meal ready before Earl came home at seven, regular as clockwork, for supper.
— Birdie? she heard Finus call after her again. -Is something wrong?
She lifted her hand, without looking back, in a feeble gesture could have stood for any number of things, I’m fine, No time, Got to run now, bye.
The Dead Girl
PARNELL GRIMES, SON of Mercury’s most prominent local funeral director, possessed a general grief for such as those unclaimed and unmoored in the world. By the time he was fourteen he’d developed a working fascination with his father’s profession, and had begun to sneak down into the preparation room to see the corpses who would be embalmed and presented the next day. And on some few occasions during that time, and always when the people had been mauled in accidents or contorted in some terrible death, he’d gone down in the wee hours to find them simply gone, disappeared, and had fled back to his room terrified that these walking dead would grasp him at every corner. The next day, their funerals would go on as planned, closed-casket. He’d been too terrified to say anything or ask, except once, and then never again. He’d pushed it deeply into a place where he would not have to think about them all the time. He was able to do that. Until the time he thought himself to blame.