He’d had no reply to all that, for right then it sounded like the truth.
— I don’t know why you stay with me unless it’s for Eric’s sake, she said. -But I swear it doesn’t seem to me that you even care enough about him to stay for that reason anymore.
He grew hot over that and said through his teeth, surprising himself at the surge of emotion that nearly brought quick tears to his eyes,
— Who are you to say I don’t love my own child?
— Well if you do, she said, you might do a little more to show it.
ALSO AT THE barbeque had been Earl’s sister, Merry, now married to the hapless R. W. Leaf, who sold insurance with old Junius Urquhart. She’d sat apart from everyone in a reclining lawn chair, surveying the scene from behind a pair of sunglasses, her long dark hair curled and brushed back, her lips a bright red, fingernails and toenails to match. She sipped what looked like a glass of bourbon on ice. Whenever Finus’s glance happened to fall on her, she caught it like a fish he’d cast a line to and sent back along that line the tactile reverberations of a slow, salacious smile. He absorbed it into his own tight grin and cranked his gaze away from her legs, crooked and slightly askew up on the footrest of the chair.
Two days later, while Finus’s father was out for lunch, Merry strolled past the plate-glass window of the Comet, paused to look, then came in the door, little bell tinkling behind her like a fairy sprite announcing her entrance.
— Hello, Finus.
— Merry.
— I’d like to place a classified ad in your newspaper, if the rate is right.
She smiled, then unclasped her purse and pulled out a little notepad and tore off the top sheet, folded it, and handed it to him. He took it, looked at her standing there with an expression he could not quite read, then unfolded the paper and read: Meet me at 4:00, back lot of Magnolia Cemetery, in the oak grove.
What he would say to Avis in his mind when she had demanded, once — just once she had allowed him to see how this had hurt her, and he couldn’t remember too many times she’d shown her vulnerable side — demanded to know why he had done it, was: Because Merry was beautiful. Not pure, by any means, but she had a flowing, let-down, buxom, long-legged beauty that just made a man want to get down in a glade with her and rut. Let loose the wildness. Her hair was dark and long and full of wavy curls, and one of her dark brown eyes was cast just a tad inward. She kept her mouth parted in the company of men, just barely, as a silent and private signal to desire her. And always the not-quite-subtle eye contact, always looking at you at just the moment, and for the moment, that you happened to look up at her, as if she had been thinking privately how much she would like to give herself to you, and was now caught at it and secretly glad.
They met in the far back and then-unoccupied lots of the new Magnolia Cemetery north of town. There was a sharp downslope and little more than a packed dirt path leading to the woodsy brush around the creek, and still plenty of trees between there and the fresh graves up on the hill, and one could just see the steep Victorian gables of the new widows and orphans’ home above the tops of a thick and leafy oak tree if one looked up over Merry Urquhart’s bare and sculpted delicate shoulders as she rode him, eyes closed and head hung forward in pleasurable concentration on the ride.
It was true what they said about her breath, it was awful, but Finus had determined early on a way around that, and had taken to bringing along a half-pint of bonded bourbon and made it a ritual that they take a few swigs apiece upon first meeting, so the halitosis was somewhat alleviated, for long enough anyway. When she got to breathing hard it sometimes seeped its way through again but by then he didn’t care so much anymore and when they were finished and lying there first thing he would do was bring the bottle up again for a ritualistic toast to what they’d just done. Merry liked a drink enough that she never suspected the reason. And it made Finus a little more daring in his attitude, anyway, and assuaged the guilt for long enough to get home, clean up, and ease into the forgetting of what he’d done, on into the evening.
Maybe the more interesting question was why had Merry chosen to have a thing with him? Usually, Birdie would later say, it was just with men who’d come fresh to town, didn’t know a thing about her, and whom she wanted to buy insurance from her husband, R.W. That way when she was bored with them, which would take about two or three weeks, maybe a month, she’d have gotten something material out of it and R.W. in his ignorance would be pleased at how she’d sweet-talked a man into buying insurance from him. Oh he knew she was a flirt, he’d say, but couldn’t conceive as how his darling would go all the way. She kept up a charade with him her whole married life. And just what kind of a person can do that, day and night?
It was because of Birdie, he knew that. They were always jealous of Birdie because they were all in love with Earl, his whole family, in love with him and in hate with him at the same time. He was the oldest sibling, and the smartest, and the handsomest, and had the most drive. And he made the most money and had thereby control, in an implicit way, over them all. Even the old man, old Junius, was worshipful in a way and bowed to Earl’s power.
And so seducing a man like Finus, whose attraction to Birdie was similar to Earl’s, was next best thing to seducing her brother himself. At least Finus figured it that way. Once he and Merry took a ride out the Macon highway, nipping from a pint of bourbon, and he’d made a joke about her reputation, and added, — Ah, you’d fuck your brother if you thought you could get away with it. They were in Finus’s Ford, but Merry was driving. She gave him a look. He noticed they were gathering speed. Ripped through Lauderdale at about ninety. Somewhere on the other side, she threw the wheel so hard to the left that he’d been thrown against the door, a miracle it didn’t open and tumble him out. A miracle the car didn’t capsize and roll, killing them both, before she could get it out of fishtail and slow to seventy, and neither of them said another word about it. They rode back to Mercury in the oppressive dark coming on, silent, radio off, looking ahead at the road and placid, as if content enough in knowing the corrupt complicity of their union, and did their duty in the cemetery after hours, evening insects cheeping and chirring around them as the hot engine of the Ford ticked toward cool, and she shouted like she never had before and held him pinned beneath her strong hands on his shoulders, fucking him with a vengeance for having had the audacity to speak the truth about her enterprising nature. And when she’d finished, and before he had, she’d pulled up off him with a merciless lack of care, a heartless sound like a foot being pulled up out of muck, and stepped out into the deep green of the darkening graveyard and stood naked among what would be the plots of the dead come forty years hence, her bare long slim feet splayed in the gathering dew on the grass, her shape hippy and beautiful, the long dark hair a thick gout against her pale back, hands resting on those hips as she looked up at a canted half-moon, and waited while he shamelessly finished himself into his own palm, watching her, until the passion of the moment was a mockery of itself, and a chill set in, and that was the last he’d heard from Merry till she waltzed uninvited and late into a tea Avis had thrown, and let Avis know simply by her familiar gestures, by picking up the last half of a cookie Finus had left on his plate and eating it, looking frankly at him, what all had occurred. His whole head had been clanging with alarm from the moment she stepped through the door. And Avis had finally and just as frankly walked up to Merry and said, — I’ll thank you to take your whore self out of my house and never come back. Merry had smiled as if Avis had falsely praised her hair or her dress, dusted the cookie crumbs in a delicate way off her fingertips, retrieved her purse from where she’d set it, conveniently, on the floor beside her chair, and walked out, head held up in victory and hips rhythmically inventing the balance she needed to stride elegantly out the door in her high-heeled shoes, given her no doubt by her brother Earl and definitely superior to any other woman’s shoes in the room. And Finus had never wanted her more than in that moment, when he knew she would never even look at him with the slightest hint of familiarity again in his life.