Mockingbird was so loud she couldn’t even see, like she was passing through that song into nothing.
Finus Querulous
THAT MORNING, FINUS had steered his old Chevy pickup into the long driveway, two parallel curving shaded wheelpaths of cracked concrete ruptured here and there by the roots of thick tall oaks, and parked beside the old pumphouse beyond which now leaned the stacked empty carapaces of gutted ancient automobiles. They filled the once grassed little meadow between the house and old Creasie’s cabin at the back edge of Earl’s property. But since his death these discarded wrecks had been hauled here for storage from Birdie’s son-in-law’s junkyard across the side road. It was something probably would have driven Earl Urquhart into a rage, him a man so in love with glamorous cars that he’d bought new every year, always paying cash. He’d had him a nice little estate out here, Finus thought as he helped his old collie, Mike, down from the passenger side and together they walked around the house back into the front yard to the main entrance.
He’d held the railing to the broad covered stoop and climbed the old Mexican tile steps, rung the buzzer. Another car went by out on the old highway, its tires slapping a regular rhythm on the tar dividers. In a minute the door to Birdie’s house opened to reveal Creasie, bent over a little. She looked up at him, then cast a scant eye down at Mike, then stood back and held the door open. -Come on in, she said, shooing them, as if they were both old dogs late for a feeding. -She don’t want no company but I imagine she’ll see you. She said the other day she wanted to talk to you. He passed Creasie and nodded down to her, her appraising eye cast up at him, and he took in her old dress cinched up beneath her baggish bosoms and ending at the SlimJim presence of her scrawny shins. Her feet in dilapidated Keds like tattered skiffs with big dusky bunions thrust out either starboard prow.
— Hello, Creasie, he said, to force a greeting.
— Mr. Finus.
— She in the den?
— She in the back laying down, Creasie said, already headed that way. -I’ll go see if she’s awake.
He followed her as far as the living room and stopped while Mike wearily followed Creasie on back. The room contained, as if sealed there, the chilled stale odor of a neglected museum dedicated to the finer middle-class living room in the 1940s. Heavy furniture with thick and gnarled wooden protrusions like mummified hands at the ends of the armrests, no give he knew to the cushions beneath fabric developing the sheen of old clothing mothballed for years, springs as hard as the springs on the rear axle of his truck. A grand piano at one end of the room gave his peripheral vision the image of a reconstructed stegosaurus. The gas logs in the fireplace, artificial hickory, not fired in twenty years. Then Creasie’s rag head popped into the far doorway and beckoned. He started across the living room, passed Creasie going the other way and listing slightly to one side, drifting back toward her kitchen.
Birdie was more drawn than before and pale, as people whose hearts are failing are, skin seeming thinner and papery, and her pale blue eyes were rheumy, though he could still see in them the innocent mischief that was her nature. She laughed.
— Mike’s already made himself at home.
The old dog had lain down beside the window, and looked with his eyes over at Finus coming in as if to say what kept you?
— You look all right, Birdie. You still look yourself.
This was true if qualified by age and illness. She was puffy with the fluid around her heart. Her hair was long and clean, silver and resting across her shoulder as she sat up against the pillows. Still the small impertinent mouth and gapped teeth. But her eyes were rheumy behind the wire-framed glasses, her hands bent and all spotted up, nails long and yellow, she’d been cared for but couldn’t really care for herself, the details showed.
— I’m not sure I ever wanted just to look myself, she said, and laughed a little.
Her bedroom was pleasant and even fairly cool, though the day was hot, late July. It was at the northeast corner of the house, and there were windows on the north and east walls, and outside the windows there were blooming azaleas, and out in the oak-shaded yard beyond there were dogwoods that in March had been solid white with blossoms, now pale-barked and leafy green. Birds flew from the dogwoods and the oaks nearer the creek at the border of the property and flitted into the azaleas, you could hear them pecking at its mulch below. A mockingbird sat somewhere nearby out of sight but not out of mind, belting a repertoire. Finus liked to imagine the phrases the birds were going through: ohmygodhelpme! ohmygodhelpme! dearme dearme dearme, lookahere! lookahere! boogedieboogedieboogedie, therewego therewego therewego, who, me? who, me? stick close! stick close! stick close! stick close! I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know. Some mornings he woke up and heard the Eurasian collared doves calling, a big Old World bird new to Florida and spreading north fast, their voices hoarse like young roosters crowing, What world is this? What world is this?
The sun lay full-bore upon the north meadow beyond but here broke through the oak boughs only in bright angled blades to the sparse and spotty lawn grass.
— This old house, Birdie said. -I don’t like being out here alone at night, but I don’t reckon I’ll have to be much longer. I mean, Creasie’s here but she just goes back in her room after supper and it’s like being alone. Oh, I tell you, Finus, I feel so weak. I wish I could just go ahead and die.
Finus said nothing and kept his face neutral.
— Tell me again what happened at the home, he said.
— Oh, well, I reckon I died and came back.
— You said that. But, now — you mean all the way out?
— I tell you, Finus, after Pud died, it just like to killed me. It ain’t right. She was ten years younger than me. And then Edsel and Ruthie. She stopped and her face went blank as if she’d forgotten what she was talking about. But she hadn’t. Just at a momentary loss for words. -And I said to myself I’m just not going to stay around any longer, it’s just not right, everybody dying but me. I believe I just started to shut down. She fiddled with a tissue at her nose. She looked up. -Well I believe I died. I was going so peaceful, just like I’d always hoped I would, and it felt so restful, and then something started happening and I woke up with all them standing over me and tubes sticking in me everywhere. Choking — it was awful! I was so mad! And now here I am, just miserable. You tell me what good’s in that. I told them just to go to the devil, I was going home. Laura and Joe said they’d hire a nurse but I told them I didn’t want it, just let Creasie tend to me best she can.