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BUT OH HELL the short of it was that in 1943 Eric was drafted into the army and shipped out to a training base in North Carolina. Finus and Avis both felt a little numbed by his absence, his infrequent letters, the sense that not only the reason for their (barely) surviving marriage but also the last medium for their animosity had disappeared. When they received word that Eric had died in a training accident at his base, never even sailed to France — or in the strange aftermath of it all — Finus felt almost as if their child had never existed, as if Eric’s whole life had been some kind of shared dream.

After the funeral, with military honors, Finus and Avis sat in her living room, he in the chair where he used to sit to have his bourbon and water at the end of a day. Avis was looking at him not with hatred or even plain anger, but with something more weary and resigned.

— I needed you, she finally said. -I did need you. I don’t know what it is in a man who seems to lose his feeling for someone, that’s if you ever really had it, as soon as that person really gives in and lets herself feel something for him. That’s what I think happened. She stared at him, waiting for a response. -What do you think? she said.

He tried to think, to respond to that, but it seemed his thoughts were just gears slipping, refusing to engage. His distraction was intimate and remote at once. He couldn’t really say what he felt.

— I think it’s more complicated than that, he finally said.

— I feel sorry for you, Avis said. -I used to think it was just that you fell in love with Birdie when we were only children, teenagers, and you never got over it. But now I don’t think it was just that. I think something in you makes it impossible for you to really love another person. God knows it’s a hard thing for someone like me to do, too, I know I’m far from perfect. But I think you’re worse, I’m sorry to say.

— Well maybe you had a little something to do with that, he said.

Avis said, very deliberately, — Go to hell.

He asked, this time, for a divorce, and again she refused. Something in her couldn’t give him that. He closed up the apartment above the Comet and moved to Tuscaloosa, Alabama, across the state line, took a job on the city desk. He drove from Tuscaloosa to Mercury to visit his parents once a month or so, but otherwise never went home. Attended his mother’s funeral in ’52. When his father died of a heart attack two years later, he quit the News, packed up, and went home to take up where his father had left off, with the Comet. Moved back into the apartment above it, nothing changed but the dust and two or three new creaks in the floors.

He wasn’t sure when he’d started thinking about Birdie again. He’d not exactly put her out of mind, especially since her friend Alberta McGauley wrote their community’s column for Finus’s paper, and was always including Birdie in her gossipy ramble. But he had spent some two or three years thinking of her only peripherally, as some vague recurring figure spinning past, as past, on fortune’s ever-spinning wheel. One early February, as if he’d poked a stick in the spokes of that wheel and stopped it, he ran into her on the sidewalk outside Schoenhof’s, chatted her up for half an hour in the windy chill before he let her go to walk the two blocks to Earl’s store, where she was headed. She was aging well. They both were. Her hair still long, and braided, pulled up onto her neck. A wool coat buttoned up, calf leather gloves. The wide gap in her smile. Pale blue eyes easy and unguarded, unaware, it would seem, of the slow accretion of rekindled interest in Finus. She gave him a peck on the cheek. He watched her cross the street, turn the corner, disappear, the small round spot in the hollow of his cold cheek tingling as if infused with warm, charged particles fine as powdered steel.

Negro Electric

WHEN EARL BUILT the new house across the road he let stand an old cabin out back, hired a maid for Birdie, and let the maid live out there during the week so she could stay later and help with supper, and be there earlier to help with breakfast, too. Said he could afford it now and wanted life to be easy for her, Birdie. Well just guilt, that. The maid, a girl named Creasie, got on her nerves, shuffling around the house in her bare feet like an old woman though she was only twelve years old. Because of his interest in herbs, Birdie’s Pappy knew the old medicine woman who lived down in the ravine at the north end of Mercury, and knew she had raised this girl and wanted to put her to work. So Earl had gone and picked her up. But from the beginning Birdie had doubts about her fitness.

In those days around Mercury, when you wanted one of them you just drove your car to the front edge of the old ravine, up where it was still woodsy and there was a little dirt turnaround in the lot next to the old Case mansion, and honked your horn. Directly one of them would poke his head out of the trail leading down in there, a boy or a young man usually, and you’d say, I need somebody to dig me a ditch, or whatever, and the boy or young man would say, How big? Oh not big just about ten foot long, yea deep, and the head would go away and in about fifteen minutes or half an hour up out of there would climb one, two, three of them, male or female depending on the job (you could ask for a washwoman or even a midwife in a pinch). But unless there was a specific job to do you rarely saw them outside the ravine. They did their trading in town on Saturday afternoons. This girl Creasie was some kind of perfect example of a ravine nigra, seemed not only to be in her own strange little world but hardly communicated outside of it, either, just a lazy Ye’m, or No’m, or a noncommittal Mmm-hmm, or just a vague and inscrutable heh heh heh. Never really making eye contact. Kind of insolent, but nothing you could really nail down. Everybody said the ravine nigras were half wild animal, anyway, and half something else like wood spirit.

They hadn’t been in the new house a year before the day Junius brought the dummy home from the trip to Little Rock, had sat him up in the backseat of his car for the drive like he was a real nigra and so everybody that saw him driving back into town thought he’d brought a strange nigra home with him. He let everybody think he’d brought home a real nigra man from Little Rock, Arkansas, and put him into a shed behind their house, Earl and Birdie’s house, and kept him there like a prisoner. One of his practical jokes. Mercury was small enough even then so that everybody knew what everybody else was up to, and people would say Well he was not just a strange nigra he was a strange-looking nigra. Mr. Urquhart would drive through downtown at a good clip so they couldn’t get a hard look at him, just see this black head poking up in the backseat with seemed like a funny expression, but who would ever think it was a wooden man, a dummy? If white people couldn’t tell strange black people apart then how were they to distinguish between the wooden and the flesh? Being driven around town like with a chauffeur, which even she thought it was odd the way black people got driven around by white people, the reason being there was no sitting on the same seat together no matter what, but wasn’t it funny. People knew this nigra was not from the shanties down in the ravine unless they’d been hiding him down there for some reason, and so for a brief period people were speculating that Creasie’s people had been hoarding this strange nigra down in the ravine, maybe because he was dangerous, maybe because he was crazy, or both.