He farmed some ten acres of the land on his family place and kept cows on the other 40, and his wife said he’d planned to give up the cows and plant pine seedlings, which she may do now that he’s gone.
Visitation and service will be at Grimes Funeral Home, the service starting at 3:00 Wednesday, and proceeding afterwards to Magnolia Cemetery. Honorary pallbearers are the workers in the works foundry. Pallbearers are James Troy, Lucky Williamson, Egstrom Anderson, Ralph Svoboda, Ted Melancon, and Barclay Teague.
Finus rolled the sheet out of the Underwood and underlined a couple of things he wasn’t sure of in pencil. He made some calls, to Midfield’s relatives and friends, made a couple of corrections, and laid the obit in the copy box on the corner of his desk, on top of the three others he’d written since Friday for Wednesday’s edition.
He looked up. Lovie was standing next to his desk, looking through her bifocals at the pages he’d done.
— Ha, she said, that chicken story. Jeepers, I remember my ma used to wring a chicken’s neck, just like that.
She made a little flick of her slim speckled wrist.
— Say that was in Indiana, Lovie?
She looked at him a second, mouth cocked.
— Michigan.
— Oh, yeah.
Jeepers, she’d said, one of her words. Rubbing his stubble, Finus considered Lovie, her fading Michigan twang now warbled into some kind of new American generic fostered by television and a misplaced embarrassment over accents in general, a psychological and self-imposed diaspora of the regional self.
— I’ve still got to write up Birdie, he said.
— Ah, poor thing.
She’d come down, Lovie had, in tow with her retiring husband in ’78. He was a salesman of nuts, the metal kind, nuts and bolts, a fisherman whose prize catches on their weekend trips to the coast she still displayed on her desk in the pastels of washed-out Polaroids. Why had they stopped here, in Mercury? Something to do with a cousin or elderly aunt, he thought he recalled. He favored one photo, with Lovie hoisting a huge red snapper, a little strip of flesh showing between her shorts and tied-up shirttail, her browned and more youthful feet beside a line of two-to-four-pounders laid out in the sand, invisible tiny fishteeth bared to the hostile air at her toes. He could have loved her, then. Anyone could’ve. His tender expression seemed to puzzle her, though.
— What? she said.
— You inspire me, Lovie.
— And just what does that mean? her voice querulous as a parrot’s.
Finus just looked at her, smiling. She gave him her admonishing look and half-hobbled back over to her computer and began tappity-tapping the keys.
Finus bent again to his more formidable machine.
BIRDIE WELLS URQUHART, 88
She was born in a little fishing village on the Alabama Gulf coast, but moved here with her family after the storm of 1906 wiped out most of the homes, and most of the people there, too.
Her favorite story about herself was that she once threw a shoe at her sister Pud to make Pud stop snoring. Funny she’d marry a man who threw shoes out his shoe store at fleeing women who’d argued with him about their shoe size. The shoes he (her husband, Earl) threw were the size the women wanted: too small. Say all you want, good or bad, about Earl Urquhart, but Birdie never wore a shoe that wasn’t right for her foot, nor any customer at the Vanity Boot Shop, either.
Along with her two sisters, she once drove three hundred miles in a day chasing Earl from town to town as he made business calls, just missing him, and then got in trouble with him later because there wasn’t any supper ready when he got home — just ahead of them. They hadn’t wanted him for any special reason. Just a whim that got out of hand.
Berthalyn (“Birdie”) Isabella Wells Urquhart died Sunday at home in her bed of apparent heart failure. She was 88. She was born on the Gulf coast and grew up in Mercury, married Earl Urquhart when she was sixteen years old and raised two children who died before she could, having lived thirty-something years a widow.
Birdie was much loved in this community and for many years helped out as a Pink Lady at the hospitals. The Pink Ladies, mostly retired housewives, wore pink outfits and helped to comfort the sick and dying. She was a good storyteller, professing ignorance but possessed of a great deal of wisdom born of long experience. Though she lived out the second half of her life in relative peace and quiet, her years with the Urquhart family after her husband’s death in 1955 were somewhat tumultuous, the subject of much local gossip. She once said she guessed the only way to finally get along with your in-laws is to outlive them. Which she did.
Survivors include two grandchildren, five great-grandchildren, several nieces and nephews, and many many good friends and admirers.
Scratching his beard stubble he pulled the obit from the platen and read it over, thinking. He knew he wouldn’t stop at that. Pretty dull. If he’d been a poet, maybe, he could have written a poem and said what was in his memory concerning her. A brief epic. If he were a novelist he could tell her story. But he was an old man with a rambling imagination, a spotty if distinct memory. He wandered over to Lovie’s desk where she clickety-clacked away, picked up the raw copy of the Spider Creek News, drew a line in pencil about where he figured twenty-one inches would stop, and put it back down on Lovie’s desk.
— That’s all, he said to Lovie, cut it there.
If not Johnette Chambliss could go on for columns with the running diary of her amazingly mundane week. Went to see my sister over in Bay Springs, she was having a time with her new washing machine, which was whirling catywampus, enjoyed our visit very much. The girls choir sang in the church Sunday morning, they sang three hymns including my favorite, we enjoyed the services very much as well. The drive home was really beautiful, the Lord had spread his grace upon the countryside, and we enjoyed the drive home through its splendor very much. I was down in the back, but managed to get Shelley Jean to drive me to see Coretta Mayfield who has been suffering so with her spider bite. Ankle still swole up big as a man’s neck and all purple like. But she was in good spirits, and served us coffee and a delicious angelfood cake from IGA and we ended up enjoying our visit very much and it seemed like Coretta did, too. There wasn’t a thing in the world Johnette and her sister or daughter or semi-comatose husband Fleck didn’t enjoy very much, be it the simple pleasures of rocking on the porch or sitting around the space heater drinking coffee and gossiping, commiserating with others ailing or lame, or the sublime pleasure of laying somebody to rest, for that grief given lip service and noted in tones reverent enough it was on to the food laid out later and to the passel of flowers bunched around the grave which were quite beautiful and the words said over the corpse plowed satinly into its coffin and maybe even a brief hymn sung by the mourners around the tent, which was beautiful and which we all enjoyed it all very much. For no doubt not to enjoy anything on God’s earth ultimately would be an affront to the Lord, cast confusion across the waters and among the peaks. Why yes Johnette we enjoyed your article this week very much.
He went back to his desk and put another sheet in the Underwood and started in.
But to take another angle. Or addendum:
She was a woman to whom nothing much happened in life except that she got married (too young), was widowed (at fifty-four, too young), had a couple of children who died (not young, but before her, so too young there too), who spent some thirty-five years of widowhood doing a little charity work but mostly just helping out with grandchildren, doing a little canning, making an astonishingly sweet and delicious tub of homemade ice cream, and visiting her two sisters until they died (at good old ages, though Pud went a little too young, and both too young by Birdie’s lights, as she was the oldest of the three). Whose sole aberration in the long line of her life should not have been her mean-as-snakes, crazy-as-loons in-laws accusing her of poisoning her husband, harassing her with missives collaged of cut-out letters from trashy magazines, which threatened among other things to have her deceased husband exhumed for an autopsy.