After vaudeville, Finus stayed off the stage until radio offered another, of a sort, in his old age. WCUV’s owner asked him to just come in for a few hours each morning, talk to folks, play some music. Over the years his sense of his audience had become more and more personalized, as he developed a sense that the only ones willing to listen to him these days were the people he actually knew, who were many, and so he spoke to them directly, saying, — Alberta McGauley, this little number’s for you in memory of the time you rode that hot air balloon all the way across the county and into Alabama, supposing just to land at the local fairgrounds, or, — All right, Ed Kruxmier, it’s bean time so we’re going to string together a few little numbers in honor of all you truck farmers already out there weeding your beans. Hear me, Ed? Got your Walkman on? Just wave if you read me, Ed. Just tap on the headset. I must be talking to myself, today.
He was a literate man and his favorite poet was Wordsworth. He’d read “Intimations of Immortality” and had a sense of how as he’d grown up from a child he’d moved further and further away from his spiritual self, his spiritual origins, and he sensed that most people experienced the same thing, a slow uncoupling, like someone stepping out of the rocket for a nice space walk, secure in knowing the life cord kept them connected, however tenuously, to the ship. And then one day they realized that the floating cord was only that, attached to nothing but their own ass, and that they were at best more like a moon held detached but distantly in tow to its planet. A body of pale memories of when they were part of the world.
Because he was a newspaper man by trade, a morning radio announcer by choice and local popularity, he kept up with the news. In addition to local items, the Mercury Comet printed any bit of interesting science news Finus got through press releases from the government and private labs. His latest fascination was the scientists’ recent belief that there were other planets in other solar systems capable of supporting earthly life. There was water and oxygen. There were clouds and sunsets, seasons, the cycles of storms. Gave new meaning to the phrase “another world.” Now they were trying to explore Mars, to see if there’d once been some form of life there, preserved cryogenically beneath frozen oceans in evidence of God knows what. One of the scientists said, Take a good look at Mars, it’s what the earth will look like one day. It had all made Finus reflective. He’d been on the air now with his morning show for twenty-five years. Was it not possible that some of his earlier shows had made their way to antennae on other worlds, through far-flung space travelers just passing through, or via some slip between or among dimensions that diminished time and space? If anything, radio waves would be the medium to slip through. Whether the antennae be metallic rods for electronic receivers or some delicate, antlike, cephalic appendage among a people for whom radio waves were the primary means of communication, he wished he’d come across as a little more intelligent. But at least if they heard his show they’d have to recognize that he was representative of a friendly race, kind and considerate of one another, willing to spend time in resisting the isolation of the human soul.
He felt the power move through him as he put on the first record, listened to its familiar bars, cleared his throat, and spoke into the microphone as if into the ear of an old friend nearly deaf — close, and loud enough to be heard, but not too loud, in his deep rich baritone twang, — Good morning Mercury and surrounding environs, thinking, Who knows how broad an environ may be? For if radio waves were not a manifestation of a Creator’s presence in the universe he didn’t know what was, and if there be a God well then his environ is Everything is it not? He felt the frequency run in his veins from the tips of his toes and fingers to the top of his head, vibrating the horny cartilage in his throat, — Good morning in the a.m. to y’all, each and ever one of you, and it’s a beautiful morning, and he played his old 45 of “The Star Spangled Banner” and looked at the notes he’d scribbled on his pad: those who were born, those who had died, those who were winning at bridge these days, and those who had traveled and come home. There was a cancer-screening vehicle coming through for the outlying rural areas. He’d note that the garden club would be planting a tree downtown and that the Mercury Heritage Library had gotten in a large shipment of new books thanks to a grant from the Selena Grimes Foundation. He’d talk a little about what the almanac said as compared to the way things turned out to be, and chat with himself about the possibility of global warming, about the national debate over Social Security and medical care, and offer some words of wisdom for the millions of baby boomers already showing signs of being perplexed with a generation of youth who were making the impetuous sixties seem quaint and tame. Finus would put the world into perspective. There wasn’t anything better for that than good conversation. It was how everything that happened in the world got filtered down into ponder-able reality, considered and thereby experienced by all. It was important to understand you were a part of the world, and of everything that happened in it. After the president had addressed the State of the Union and gone on to bed and dreamed about being a naked child standing onstage having forgotten the words to “The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere,” after an astronaut had walked in space and come back and touched down and gone home and made love to his wife in passionate exhilaration and mortal fear, after a serial killer had murdered some innocent stranger and slipped back into rational life and gotten his hair cut and had a meal with his friends and maybe even gone to church on Sunday, was the experience soon any more his or hers than it was everyone’s who’d heard about it, imagined it, envisioned it, and mulled it over in his or her mind? It didn’t necessarily seem so to Finus, for whom all experience now seemed to have been filtered through his own blood and bones. He’d lived through eighty-nine revolutions around the sun. Long enough for the residual energy of millions of years to have mingled with and charged his own as if his body was a rechargeable cell.
But it would all become particulate, and slough away as dust adrift on the earth. The world would spin on, and toss and mix such dust as had been him and Albert Schweitzer and George Washington and Thomas Jefferson and the poor souls of the Dust Bowl depression and the dead frozen Russians in Siberia, and poor Midfield who’d died the day before. And Birdie Urquhart, too, with whom he would visit nearly every day, sometimes for an early coffee before his show, when she would part the little curtains at the kitchen table, It’s candlelight, soon be time for Finus Bates to go in to work. Even Birdie would be more a part of him than ever before, now that she was gone. Everyone would be filtered through the eyes, skin, and lungs of the living, into the very fiber and sap of the trees, mingling and mixing and some finally slipping back out into what was not emptiness after all, but was the vast, articulate space between beautiful worlds.
Cephalantus Accidentalis
LATE MORNING, SECOND day of a July Methodist youth retreat to a wide and lazy stretch of the Chunky River, 1917, young Finus Bates felt the effects of a little shine he and the other boys had sneaked off to consume the evening before. He rushed from the campsite down a trail and slipped inside the thick-leaved cover of a buttonbush beside a tiny clearing. Hadn’t been there long, voided but still too shaky to leave, when he heard voices come along the path, and through the slivers of space between the whorled, elliptical buttonbush leaves he saw two girls, Avis Crossweatherly and Birdie Wells.