Southern Ghosts

The Heaven of Mercury is a tale of luckless love. This first novel by Brad Watson, former Briggs-Copeland Lecturer on English and American Literature and Languagea at Harvard, traces the lives of Finus Bates and Birdie Wells, prominent residents of an imagined Southern city called Mercury. Watson creates a patchwork of anecdotes narrated by many colorful characters in his attempt to knit together the convergent histories of these two protagonists.

Finus is the Actaeon of this uniquely Mississippi myth. In 1916, he spies the youthful Birdie turning naked cartwheels in the woods. This encounter with the goddess-like teenager metamorphoses Finus; he becomes a stag.

A few years later, Birdie is engaged to Earl Urquhart, a philandering suitor uniquely unfit to wed this wonderful woman. Just before the wedding, though, Earl rashly risks his bride in a poker game, and Finus wins her from him. Fate prevents Finus from collecting on his debt, and some years later he marries Birdie’s childhood friend, Avis, even though he doesn’t love her.

Time passes and paths cross. But Birdie and Finus never do get together. Unlike in Gabriel García Márquez’ Love in the Time of Cholera, the ill-starred couple never are united, even as a reward for outliving their circumstantial adversaries—their spouses.

When asked why, if this is a love story, his characters don’t live happily ever after, Watson says, “I think all too often people don’t end up with the love of their lives. They end up with someone they love okay and they stick it out, or they don’t. Finus and Birdie never get together, and to some extent it’s a result of bad timing, the odd luck of timing, that so often keeps people so right for each other apart.”

Interestingly, the execution of the novel itself seems to parallel the failed love of Birdie and Finus. There are points at which the timing is off; the chronological contortions are jarring and characters narrate out of nowhere.

For example, Creasie, the servant in the Urquhart home, lends her voice to tales of voodoo in the swampy former plantation where Mercury’s African-American population is concentrated. A wooden dummy comes to life for her in the body of her lover, Frank, who disappears as soon as the dummy is removed from a storage shed. The elements of the fantastic that pop up in these parts of the story are not even magically real, just plain ridiculous. They seem severed from the main stream of history flowing through the novel.

Subplots involving Parnell Grimes, the director of Mercury’s funeral home, also compromise the harmony of the tale. The necrophiliac undertaker and his wife, who dies a little death for him at orgasm, may serve as a counterpoint to Finus and Birdie’s unfulfilled sexualities—even the dead can copulate, but they can’t. Still, the new characters feel sensationally extraneous.

While they’re not having sex, the dead play an important role in the novel. Watson says, “the ‘Heaven of Mercury’ [is] everywhere. In the characters’ minds, and their memories, in the presence of the dead in their waking and dreaming lives, and in their communion with spirits, real or imagined.” Finus writes obituaries about his friends and acquaintances for the Mercury newspaper, which he edits and owns. The dead are constantly being summed up into bulleted recollections and pithy paragraphs. Ghostly spirits appear, too, and infiltrate reality on a regular basis; this happens much more at the end, when the tale starts to disintegrate into wild fantasy and unclear parable.

For a first novel, The Heaven of Mercury is quite captivating—like first love, it absorbs those who spot it and draws them in closer. Watson’s fluid prose and ample descriptions build the story into something wonderful, despite its flaws. Without the forced integration of elements of magic, it would certainly be a more magical book. However, even just as it is, The Heaven of Mercury casts a spell.