— Do you think he was going to leave you? he said. -Did you?
She shrugged, after thinking for a moment.
— I always said he’d never leave me for anyone he just slept with, she said, pulling at a loose thread on her skirt.
— But this wasn’t just that, Finus said.
She shook her head.
— I knew that, anyway.
They were quiet a while.
— It had to be Merry sent me that letter, Birdie said. -Stole it from Earl’s office and mailed it to me just for meanness. Meanness to him or to me, I don’t know. Both, I guess. I think he knew I had it, what had happened. He was nervous and irritable about it. But he wouldn’t ask.
— You didn’t say anything to him.
She shook her head.
— I didn’t want to make a fuss about it. She looked up. -Well what difference would it have made, anyway, Finus?
— Maybe make him face up to what he was doing—
— And maybe decide to leave me. I didn’t ever think he would, he knew I couldn’t get by on my own. I’ve never worked, just been a housewife and a mother. Never went past the eighth grade. What would I do for a living?
Finus said nothing.
— I’m going to ask Edsel and his family to move in with me out here, I think, she said. -Just to have somebody around, and my grandchildren. They don’t have a house yet, and this one’s so big. Maybe they’d be happy here for a while.
— That sounds like a good idea.
He could still see her, a young girl naked in the woods, turning like a wheel in the light slanting through riverside trees. Looked at her feet now in the new slight slippers from Earl’s store and remembered her short plump girl’s feet flung up and over, how they made a ka-thump sound upon landing on the ground, the little muff of hair diaphanous in light from the leafy boughs behind her. He flushed with physical pleasure and a lamentable sense of loss. He wanted to go over, kiss her on the cheek. Felt as if he could not keep himself from doing it, in any case. But then he heard a whistling sound from the kettle, and Creasie pushed through the swinging door from the dining room to the kitchen. In a minute she came into the room carrying teacups steaming on little fragile saucers, no tray, just one saucer tilted in each hand, Lipton labeled tea strings hanging over the cup rims, a look on her face as if she were in some distant thought, had arrived in the room almost by luck, the kerchief on her head a comical nod to some old type though she was still a young woman, this belied too by the lump of dip pooching out her lower lip.
— Thank you, Creasie, Birdie said, her voice a little wavery.
— Yes’m, Creasie said, and ambled out of the room on, Finus just then noticed, a pair of pink-bottom, slightly squashed-down splayed bare brown feet.
IT WAS ON one afternoon while they were fishing for bream on a bed stinking of roe that he felt silently overwhelmed with a sense of urgency, that whether or not he understood what he’d felt for this woman now and at various times in the past he had to make a move, had to leap into something in order to understand the very element in which he existed, to understand his own mind.
He looked at her. Just a little plump with her fifty-four years, hair still dark brown and long, in a braid this day, a few gray strands, a little fleshier in the cheeks, but still pretty. The same impertinent mouth, the gapped teeth. Easy laugh. She saw him looking.
— What? she said.
— Do you know, Birdie, he said, I’ve seen you naked.
— What?
— A long time ago, the day you fell into the river during the picnic at the Methodist retreat. I was in the bushes when you and Avis came down the path to change you.
She colored. -Well what am I supposed to say to that?
— I don’t know. Something happened to me that day, watching you. Avis saw me in there.
— Well what were you doing there? Just spying?
— Yes, but not on purpose. I’d gotten sick, went away from the camp, and y’all just happened along.
— You should have said something before I took my clothes off.
— I didn’t have time. I didn’t know what y’all were up to. Well I couldn’t, I had my own pants around my ankles. But what I wanted to say, you put a spell on me that day. It’s like it’s never worn off, all these years.
Just saying those words released something in him, a prickling, blood pressure up, compromised vision.
— What kind of spell?
— That’s what I’d like to know. I was stricken. Smitten, maybe, but stronger than that. I wanted you, somehow. I was so mad you decided to marry Earl.
She laughed, half dismissal and half embarrassment. She lifted her line from the water, examined the worm on the hook, and lowered it in again.
They sat in uncomfortable silence for a while.
— I don’t have to remind you that you’re still a married man. I probably shouldn’t even be out here fishing with you, come to think of it. Sometimes I forget you and Avis are still married.
Finus snorted. -Wish I could. No, sometimes I do. But only for a moment or two at a time.
— Listen, Finus. Oh, I don’t even like to throw my mind back so far. But you were right way back when you said I wasn’t ready to get married, too young. And so much of my life went into it. I just want to be alone, live with Edsel and his family awhile, as long as they want to stay with me at the house. I’m just tired, I feel worn out. Like I’ve had the life drained out of me. I know I’m not real old but I feel old. You’re a good man. You had a bad marriage, I know. I did too in some ways, but it was good in others. If you want to try to convince Avis to give you a divorce, well go ahead, I think it’s best anyway. But I don’t want to run right into something else again. I’ve lived a whole life already, seems like. I may have more in me but not right now. Maybe not ever. I just want to rest. All this mess has just exhausted me.
— I’m not talking about marrying. He laughed. -I don’t really know what I want, Birdie.
— So what else is new? she said, but gentle, mocking him.
— Finus, she said after a bit, you and I are friends and I like it that way, always have. Even if you have seen me without my clothes on.
And she laughed, then, to think of it, and the sight and sound of it released a flood of feeling that was deeper than the old surge of sexual desire, though he felt a stir of that, too. How much he was drawing upon that indelible image he could not know. It didn’t matter.
— I love you, Birdie. Always have, from the first time I saw you, I believe.
— You don’t mean that any more than you did the last time you said it.
But she remembered that he had once said it, a long time ago. He took note of that.
Obits
AS FINUS GREW older, obituaries came to make up a goodly portion of the Comet, which was nearing the end of its arcing streak as was its body of readers. Often he was asked to write the obits for people not necessarily from Mercury though well known throughout the county because he made an attempt to tell something notable, or even simply funny or unusual, about that person’s life. Your average obituary was a disgrace in its sterility. Nor could he stand the notion of families writing their own, which some papers were allowing now. He could just imagine the tears and flapdoodle from those pens, along with a host of the awfulest verse. He should know. Some still had the audacity to ask him to print their own words, whereupon he’d tell them to take it to one of those papers that made you pay for obit space. His newspaper wasn’t the community wailing wall. You couldn’t convince a body anymore that there was integrity in the use of the language.