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  Praise for Brad Watson’s The Heaven of Mercury

  FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD

  “Extraordinary…. Mixes whimsy and hard truth in a way that’s heartbreaking…. Pungently erotic, and as affectionate as it is acidic…a perfect modern southern gothic.”

  —Mark Rozzo, Los Angeles Times Book Review

  “An intensity reminiscent of Faulkner, a bleak humor that recalls Flannery O’Connor, a whimsy inspired by Eudora Welty and a spontaneity suggesting prime Barry Hannah…. Reading The Heaven of Mercury certainly restores one’s faith in Southern literature’s ability to startle and surprise…the risks pay off with insightful observations, dynamic relationships and scenes that crackle with tension and possibility.”

  —Memphis Commercial Appeal

  “[A] lushly written novel of Deep Southern dream and landscape.”

  —Richard Eder, New York Times

  “A vivid mythology of a small Southern town that moves to a strange, electrifying beat. Think of it as an Irish blues…as something that goes beyond the literal—and way beyond the pale of most contemporary Southern fiction.”

  —Atlanta Journal-Constitution

  “Sort of a calm wail. Each page a deep pleasure. A book at life’s pace yet somehow without any of its tedium. Only the Irish geniuses wrote like this.”

  —Barry Hannah, author of Airships, Ray, and Yonder Stands Your Orphan

  “The Heaven of Mercury possesses as sharp an ear for Southern speech, both black and white, as any novel published in the last 30 years…. A superb novel, graced with lush and exciting prose in the Southern high rhetorical tradition.”

  —Raleigh News and Observer

  “A rich history of Southern literature just became richer with Watson’s first novel…. Moving and mystical. Watson…moves deftly between now and then, and occasionally between now and the hereafter, to map new literary territory.”

  —Orlando Sentinel

  “Death, sex, supernatural spells, and bad marriages are among the essential elements for a Southern Gothic novel. But like the masterpieces penned by the writers who developed this celebrated literary tradition, Brad Watson’s first novel, The Heaven of Mercury, feels anything but formulaic…. Watson’s simple, compelling prose…resonates with emotion.”

  —Liza Weisstuch, Boston Globe

  “As mythic and miraculous as Faulkner and Marquez. Amazingly original, and a sublime delight for the lucky readers who get their hands on it. A novel so fine you don’t want it to ever end.”

  —Larry Brown, author of Father and Son and Fay

  “Thrillingly ambitious…. Watson does not merely invoke Faulkner and García Márquez, but seems at times to speak straight through them.”

  —Book

  “The Heaven of Mercury reads like the love between its two principal characters. The story is ethereal yet comforting, intangible but somehow permanent. It has the necessary components of love, anguish and magic, and it incorporates the dramatic and the unreal. Watson imbues his work with an elegance that sets it apart from the rest.”

  —Boston Herald

  “Watson has written a novel at once intimate and epic, magical and real—a dazzling Southern gothic in which love and hate claim equal hold on the human heart…. Slipping easily between heaven and earth, between fanciful dreams and waking nightmares, Watson has given us a bravura performance. The Heaven of Mercury is an astonishing novel, one that burns with passion, color, and breathtaking prose—one that cements Brad Watson’s place among our great American writers of fiction.”

  —Jackson Advocate

  “The Southern novel, with its ear for the music of words and its delight in off-kilter characters, returns with gale force in the pages of this sparkling debut…. Watson tracks decades in the small town of Mercury, Miss. (based upon his hometown of Meridian), spinning indelible tales and characters with magic, poetry, empathy and sour mash.”

  —John Marshall, Seattle Post-Intelligencer

  “The best thing to come out of the South since A Confederacy of Dunces. I haven’t seen or heard such an eloquent flow of just-right words since Odysseus was caught lying to Athena.”

  —Gregory Rabassa, professor at Queens College, City University of New York, and translator of Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude and other novels

  “A fast-paced, myth-echoing, tragic-comic commentary on our modern lives.”

  —Bookpage

  “A strangely beautiful book that resonates with echoes of William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor, with mythic touches of Gabriel García Márquez thrown in here and there…. Watson’s writing is lush, earthy, drenched in atmospheric detail…. A strange novel, this one—strange and uncommonly fine.”

  —Charlotte Observer

  “Seamless…superb…. Southern storytelling is alive and well in Watson’s capable hands.”

  —Kirkus Reviews, starred review

  “Finely wrought…. Ruefully romantic.”

  —Booklist

  “The Heaven of Mercury is a tragicomic story of missed opportunities and unjust necessities that wittily explores the souls of its highly colorful cast of characters. It is suffused with an almost savage lyricism that illumines every accurate detail and nuance of place and speech. The light this novel casts is so brilliant it makes even its own shadows luminous. Brad Watson has struck a fresh and thrilling note.”

  —Fred Chappell, author of Look Back All the Green Valley

  “Gimcrack storytelling…grounded by generous humanity.”

  —Entertainment Weekly

  “Watson’s keen eye for the human condition alone makes The Heaven of Mercury a worthwhile read, and you may find yourself accruing a particular type of knowledge that not even Faulkner could impart.”

  —Literal Latte

  “What a delectable treat this novel is, on every level. Large-spirited, raucous, darkly comic and comedically dark, and above all, just plain fun, this fable will stay with me the way personal experience stays with me—a wondrous elaboration on the theme of love.”

  —Richard Bausch, author of Someone to Watch over Me

  “Lovely, poignant, funny first novel, a book filled with fascinating, unpredictable, original characters…. Watson has a Faulkneresque understanding of human nature in the employ of an earthy, lively prose style that limns his characters with nuanced sympathy and wit…. The Heaven of Mercury finally is about love and loss, grief and remembrance, rage and caring. In other words, about the business of living, a subject on which Watson is well worth hearing.”

  —The State (Columbia, S.C.)

  “How thoroughly Brad Watson understands that emotions have no expiry date and how elegantly he writes about them. Vividly peopled, full of surprises, The Heaven of Mercury is a deeply satisfying novel.”

  —Margot Livesey, author of Eva Moves the Furniture

  “[A]n unforgettable story…. The accidents, the disappointments, the corrections, and the secrets each life contains are woven into a deeply sympathetic portrait of small town life at its worst and best.”

  —Nashville Advocate

  ALSO BY BRAD WATSON

  Last Days of the Dog-Men

  THE HEAVEN OF MERCURY

  a novel

  BRAD WATSON

  W. W. Norton & Company · New York · London

  For Mimi, Sissy, Velma, and WEW,

  bless their sweet, conflicted hearts.

  Copyright © 2002 by Brad Watson

  All rights reserved

  First published as a Norton 2003

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110

  Library of Co
ngress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Watson, Brad.

  The heaven of Mercury / by Brad Watson.

  p. cm.

  ISBN: 978-0-393-32465-5

  1. City and town life—Fiction. 2. Mississippi—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3573.A8475 H43 2002 2002023103

  W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110

  www.wwnorton.com

  W. W. Norton & Company Ltd., Castle House, 75/76 Wells Street, London W1T 3QT

  Acknowledgments

  I’D LIKE TO thank the following people and institutions: the Seaside Institute, for a month at Seaside, Florida, where I began this book and had a wonderful time; the American Academy of Arts and Letters; the Great Lakes Colleges Association; the Department of English and American Literature and Language at Harvard University; the Department of English at the University of Alabama; Jack Shank, for his three-volume history of Meridian, Mississippi, which was valuable for facts and information; the staff at the Foley Public Library, for help finding documents about early Baldwin County history; my students, for reminding me of what’s important. For reading manuscripts and offering wise advice and encouragement, my enduring gratitude to Helen Vendler, Julie Anne McNary, Kim O’Neil, Karl Iagnemma, Sam Shaw, and Nell Hanley; thanks to David Gessner for urging me to get on with it. Other friends who lent support and encouragement are too numerous to name here, but I am grateful for their many kindnesses. I once again thank the members of my families—Collins, Watson, and Nordberg—for their patience, love, and support, especially Jeanine for infinite patience in addition to the rest. Thanks to Peter Steinberg, of JCA Literary Agency, for sound advice and advocacy. Finally, I’d like to thank Stefanie Diaz, Bill Rusin, Carolyn Sawyer, Ashley Barnes, and everyone else at W. W. Norton & Company; most especially I’d like to thank my editor, Alane Salierno Mason, sine qua non.

  Although the town of Mercury, Mississippi, in this book bears some resemblance to my hometown, Meridian, I have taken many liberties with regard to historical, geographical, demographic, and other facts. Meridian, Mississippi, is farther from the Gulf coast, is more populous, prosperous, and demographically diverse than the town represented here as Mercury. In a few cases I have used the names of real places as they stand or stood in Meridian, or referred to real historical incidents, but their use here is not meant to represent the facts about them any more or less realistically than they might be represented in an actual dream.

  Contents

  I.

  Finus ex Machina

  Cephalantus Accidentalis

  Self-Reliance

  Giddyup

  Aunt Vish

  Birdicus Urquhartimus

  The Dead Girl

  Finus Connubialis

  Negro Electric

  Discussion with the Dummy

  A Tree Spirit

  Woodpile

  Wisdom

  Blood

  Habeas Corpus

  Black Heart

  Finus Inquisitus

  Obits

  II.

  Her Remembrance of Awakened Birds

  Finus Querulous

  Finus Uxorious

  Saviors

  Selena in Ecstasy

  Finus Homerus

  Through the Mockingbird

  Finus Melonius (the Ratio of Love)

  Finus Impithicus

  Finus Magnificus

  III.

  A Pair of Boots

  Finus Resurrectus

  A Lost Paradise

  Grievous Oscar

  Finus Infinitus

  I

  Finus ex Machina

  FIVE HUNDRED FEET above the highest building in downtown Mercury, thrust up amidst the light and swirling, lifting fog, the tower beacon for WCUV-AM glowed on and off with the regularity of a low pulse. Its red bulb illuminated a sphere of fog, so that it looked as if some throbbing, miasmic planet were drifting in the nebulous field of another, yet unformed. But then the huge red sun rose behind it all, the fog dissipated in wisps and curls, and you could see the skeletal structure of the tower, its base attached to the tip of the Dreyfus Building, at fifteen stories the closest thing to a skyscraper Mercury had. From a great distance it appeared to stand like a lone building left after a cyclone, though actually surrounded by all the low and empty-eyed smaller buildings in this slowly dying downtown, where few even of the remaining residents shopped or strolled, a town of twenty thousand that had been twenty thousand now for almost the entire century, a static death in a growing region, all migratory growth flowing around it. The aging downtown buildings, homes, railyards and junkyards, fairgrounds, car lots, truck stops, drab shopping centers, and small factories of Mercury were strewn east and west from this locus along a narrow valley one hundred miles inland from the Gulf coast, as if hurled there by the tornado that actually had destroyed the old section of downtown by the railroad tracks in 1906.

  That being the blow that both stalled the city’s momentum as a growing rail and trade center and drove nearly all its black population out of what had been a discrete and sprawling neighborhood around the tracks and (destitute) to a wooded area around a long and broad wooded ravine north of town owned by the scion of a decrepit and brambly once-plantation there, a man who claimed that since the Case family had brought all the black people to Mercury in 1837, a Case should take care of them now when they had nowhere to go. He allowed them to squat in his woods, gave them rough materials with which to build little shacks, gave them food in the beginning, and there protected they huddled and intermarried and developed a reputation among Mercury whites as being insular, strange, and half-wild creatures of the wood, domesticated only to the point of performing household chores. Just in the previous thirty years or so, the last Case descendants either long dead or moved on to another kind of life, they had begun to trickle out to homes in old neighborhoods around the ravine and quietly slip their best (as wood creatures slip into our midst unbeknownst) into the local public schools and state universities and beyond, to live as real human beings in the real world. Mercury was still a curiously segrated town in that way. At this point, only its odd enervation knew no ethnic or social constraints.

  The valley was a river basin once thicketed with tall pines and broadleaf and run by bear, panther, deer, raccoon, bobcat, coyote, and flown by all manner of bird. In downtown anyway, only the birds remained, with the occasional disoriented, desperate coyote or coon. The deer ran the woods around. The bear were gone north, the panther south and west, the bobcat to near extinction. When one spied a bobcat in the woods, the bobcat seemed as surprised, even alarmed by his own presence as the one who spied it. Again it was as if the 1906 storm, marking the new century’s change, had tossed all the old far around and left it ravaged for the new. But the birds returned, unfazed, to flick and flit through the streets and around the old blank-eyed windows of downtown, to crisscross the air above the dwindling number of humans who toddled along its sidewalks, who stood dazed in its dusty windows, not long for this world, who seemed but images left behind, photocopied in little pockets of palpable humidity. The birds lived on with a sublime unawareness of oblivion or genetic continuity, an ever-present life form that would never go away as long as the earth remained the blue-and-green planet we all know. The old saying went the cockroaches would outlive everything, but Finus Bates, for one, knew the birds would feed on cockroaches easily, happily, forever.

  Inside the tiny studio on the Dreyfus Building’s fifteenth floor, Finus’s burled and veiny, spotted hand flipped a switch and sent a signal up the tower and into the air. He left his finger on the switch for a long, symbolic moment. He was the medium between electric power and radio wave. He would give the senseless impulse speech, and speech which was the words of not just Finus but the whole community, which was for some in effect the whole world. He felt as if he tapped the strength of life itself, with which he could infuse his listeners as a tonic against the possibility of not rising to meet the day.
r />   He had the ironic, wizened face of a vaudevillian straight man, which he actually had been a few times in his late teens. When traveling vaudeville acts would stop in Mercury on the circuit, they sometimes wrote him in as a kind of punching bag for their roundhouse jokes because his somber dignified expression, onstage, was funny. He’d even gotten to know George Burns, in those days before George had made it. Old George would sometimes call on the phone during Finus’s radio show and they’d talk for a while, about vaudeville and Gracie and George’s memories of visiting Mercury, and about George’s revivified fame as Hollywood’s favorite geezer. Finus’s audience in Mercury, mostly old white folks, had gotten so used to hearing George Burns call him up every month or so that in unguarded moments they almost thought of George Burns as a fellow resident, someone with whom they shared a collective knowledge of their histories, their individual lives. After all, Finus would talk to George about them, George knew many of their names. These people wouldn’t have been surprised to see George tottering along Mercury’s cracked and cantilevered sidewalks looking for someplace to get a good martini. Some of the old men caught themselves at times pretty sure they had actually met George, stopped to shoot the breeze with him outside Ivyloy’s barbershop, watched him screw one of those plastic tips onto the crown of his cheap cigar.

  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.