PARASITES

Robert Hill Long

The lacy ferns which fetch the highest greenhouse prices grow rank and out of reach downtown, in cracked stone columns and eaves of buildings like this museum--a survivor of three colonial languages. On the steps, a boy peels last week's sunburn from his arms, flings dead skin to the plaza pigeons. Inside, his parents take a quick bored tour of relics--cutlasses, candle molds, leg irons, wax figures in period costume.       When the overcast morning lightens, the shouts of mule-drivers carry farther, echo in the museum arcade where two cannons aim across the river they were meant to guard forever. Touring schoolchildren reach into the cannon mouths to touch the moldy cork, then pull back laughing. Their fingers are blackish-green with what the teacher calls "living history."       Across the square, a wife nags her husband to have his portrait done in pastel or watercolor, so she can carry a bit of the city's color to their drab, weedy parish. The artist's fence-hung gallery features celebrities copied from magazine poses. At the wife's feet, pigeons stab at crumbs falling from the half- eaten biscuit she waves to support her argument. At last the husband consents to be pictured, but only in charcoal.       The afternoon continues to lighten. On the museum's facade, blackened plaster and exposed brick affirm their kinship to the river silt and clay from which they were reared. The head curator--bald, anemic, a history buff--complains to everyone who visits his austere office that the ferns are parasites: they break down the mortar, they weaken the structure. The roof's too slippery to reach them with herbicides; he proposes exterminating the pigeons instead. But the rest of the day eases past with no lasting decision reached.       At dusk, a wino steps out from the darkening arcade and unslings his broken-necked guitar. His voice wobbles and cracks; his torn, rope-belted pants drive the last sightseers off the steps and benches. Behind him, the Confederate submarine is slightly more oxidized from all the small moist hands laid against it. The pigeons have picked the plaza clean, they clatter up among the ferns to roost. Outside history, in ordinary darkness, they nod, puff out iridescent ruffs, sleep.

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