Mickelsson's Ghosts (43 page)

“Sprague, you said their name was?” Mickelsson said.

“That's right. Can't quite recall their given names. I think the woman's was somethin like—” He looked at the sky for a moment, then said, as if reading it, “Theodosia.”

Mickelsson raised his eyebrows.

“Yep. Some kind of religious name. All them old-timers had religious names. More strange religions in these pahrts than a man could shake a stick at.”

“I believe I'd heard that,” Mickelsson said. He remembered his visitors and asked, “Are there many Mormons left? I had a couple drop in on me this morning.”

Pearson's look was rueful. “Not many, but people say they're comin back. You see a lot more of 'em on the road, these days, and I hear they been dickerin for a big old house in Montrose”—he turned his head, one eyebrow raised, to examine Mickelsson—”Quackenbush place, up against the church, white house with pillars and a big round porch in front. Back in 1900 it was a bank, they say. Oldest house in Montrose. They won't get it. Nobody likes to sell to 'em.”

Mickelsson nodded. “I've seen the place.”

Pearson looked down at the dowsing rod. After a minute he said, “Cryin shame.”

When it was clear that he wouldn't continue unprodded, Mickelsson asked, “About the Mormons, you mean?”

“They're clubby,” Pearson said, and squinted. “There's somethin unnatural abowt people all hangin together like that. The Baptists, now, they may be mean sons of bitches, but there's no way they're ever gonna take over the world. Too ornery. Can't get along well enough to get organized. Even the Catholics, they don't really make you nervous. Half the things they do in the world the Pope says they shouldn't, but they go right ahead and do it anyways. You don't have to worry about people like that, at least no more'n you'd worry about a common Presbyterian. But the Mormons, now—” He stared at the dowsing rod, lips compressed, trying to come up with exactly what he thought, and at last brought out, “Clubby.”

“Well, they're healthy, you've got to admit that,” Mickelsson said, and grinned. “They live practically forever.”

“Yup.” Pearson nodded. He looked out over the valley for a minute, then turned to squint up at Mickelsson again. “You seen those churches the Mormons gaht?” he asked. “I saw a picture of the one down in Washington, D.C. Big white thing, looks like they built it for one of them science-fiction pictures. Bunch of white spires that go pokin up like fork-tines, golden angels on top blowin trumpets. I tell you, I don't think I'd care to do business with a God wants a church like that. Wants to scare you and let you know your place—right under his boot. Those churches over in Europe, now—those cathedrals—they're a whole different thing. They make you think of a God that's
mighty
powerful,
mighty
impressive, but they let you know he's gaht some human in him; there's a chance if you talked to him he might know English. Same with the Methodist and Presbyterian churches, they let you know God's gaht his human side; and the Baptist churches, hell, anybody that can do card-tricks could take over for
that
God. But the God that thought up the churches of the Mormons”—Pearson shook his head as if sorry he had to say it—“he must've come down here from Pluto.”

“Well, I imagine the Mormons do a great deal of good in the world,” Mickelsson said, glancing toward the woods.

“Sure they do. Same as ants and bees.” He leaned forward and, after a moment, stood up. “I suppose they're all right,” he said. “Somebody thinks he knows how to get through this world alive, I take off my hat to'm.” He held out the dowsing rod, adjusting his grip, preparing to march down the mountain.

“I take it you're neither a Mormon nor a Baptist,” Mickelsson said, smiling. “Or a Catholic or Presbyterian,” he added.

Pearson turned to stare at him. “I'm a witch,” he said. “They didn't tell you that?”

Mickelsson stared, for the hundredth time uncertain whether or not he was having his leg pulled. “I guess I heard there were one or two of those around,” he said, carefully not giving Pearson the satisfaction of a questioning look.

Pearson nodded soberly, staring down at the forked stick in his hands. If he'd been teasing, the mood had now left him. “This country's seen it all,” he sighed, and slightly shook his head. “I imagine it's something to do with the darkness, the way the clouds are always there, or if they happen to break for a half a day it's like a miracle.” He raised his head to look across the valley. “People joke about it having a spell on it, this country, specially fahrm people tryin to make somethin grow out of them rocks. But it does have, I always thought. Maybe gaht a whole lot of spells on it, layer on layer of 'em, clear back to the time of the Ice Age. Prehistoric animals, when they were driven owt, put a spell on it; Indians, when the white people came along, they put a spell on it. Then the Pennsylvania Dutch, then the railroad people, now the Polish and Italian dairy fahrmers … Course none of the spells do a thing, that's the truth of it.” He narrowed his eyes to slits. “Mountains don't care,” he said. “They're like a old lean cow, they give you what they can, and if it ain't enough they let you die and they forget you. Maybe dream you, once in a while, that's my theory—bring you back for a minute, like the Spragues down there.”

“There's more life in the place than you'd think, though,” Mickelsson said, falling in with the old man's mood. “Every night around dusk the deer come out, great big herds of 'em. They stand up there grazing almost to the first morning light.”

“Yup,” Pearson said, “lotta deer, all right. Bear too, though you'll never see 'em. Plenty of skunks, too—them you will see, owt crawling around your woodpile, lookin for bees and beetles. Coons, possums, thousand different species of birds …”

“Rattlesnakes,” Mickelsson said.

“Hob-goblins,” Pearson said.

They looked at each other as if reassessing. At last Pearson grinned and looked away.

It was dusk when Pearson finally found strong water, or claimed he had, right beside the garden fence. They marked the place with a stake and went into the kitchen to settle up. The dog stood just outside the door looking abused, and in brief consternation Mickelsson wondered if by country manners he should invite the dog in. Immediately he dismissed the thought. It was odd how in everything he did with the old man he felt foolish. A problem of the different languages they spoke, no doubt, every word and gesture half foreign. While he was writing the check, Pearson fingered the scraped place on the door.

“I see you scratched off the hex sign,” he said.

“Yes,” Mickelsson said. “You think it was a bad idea?”

Pearson shrugged. “It's yore howse now.” He hung his rough hands on the bib of his overalls and looked into the livingroom. “You got a buckled floor,” he said. “I don't recall seeing that before.”

“I've got to fix that, if I can figure out how,” Mickelsson said. “According to the doc, there's a spring under the house.”

Pearson's mouth dropped slowly open and he pointed at the floor as if imagining it was he who was having his leg pulled. “You gaht a spring,” he said slowly, “right under the howse?”

“That's what I was told,” Mickelsson said.

“Well, I'll be damned,” Pearson said. He pointed toward the kitchen door and the darkness beyond. “You got a spring right there under the floor, and I spent half the afternoon owt there wandering around in the weeds with a stick. …”

“Jesus,” Mickelsson said, dawn breaking.

Pearson's eyes widened, and then suddenly both of them were laughing. The old man's normally gray face darkened and he laughed as if he could barely get his breath. Mickelsson leaned on the refrigerator, shaking.

“Jehoshaphat!” the old man said, clacking his false teeth.

Mickelsson bent over. He brought out, “Talk about city slickers!”

“Lord, I should charge you triple!” Pearson roared.

“I told you I've been away from the farm a long time!” Mickelsson said.

“Long time is right!” He drew back now, both of them getting their laughter into partial control. “Well,” Pearson said, “if it was anybody else I'd say you owed me a drink!”

“Good idea,” Mickelsson said, and, with one more whinny, wiping his eyes, went over to the cupboard for glasses.

They drank in the kitchen, Mickelsson unable to figure out whether or not it would be right to invite the old man into the livingroom. “Craziest thing I ever heard of,” the old man said, and they laughed again.

Sometime into their second drink, Mickelsson asked, “By the way, how's your wife?”

“Etta Ruth died,” Pearson said. “Happened three weeks ago Wensdee.”

Mickelsson set down his glass. “I'm sorry.” To his horror he realized that his lips were still smiling.

Pearson waved it off, not meeting his eyes, his expression stern. “No need to be. She was sick with that cancer a long time.” Still looking stern, he stretched his lips in a grim, fake smile. “Spring right under the howse,” he said, “and old John Pearson out there stompin through the weeds! Lord Jehoshaphat, that's a good one!”

That night, though he hadn't arranged ahead, as she liked for him to do, he went down to see Donnie. When he knocked on her door she called brightly, from a distance, probably the bedroom, “Who is it?”

“It's me,” he said.

When she spoke again the brightness that had been in her voice was gone. “I can't come to the door, I'm taking a bath,” she called.

He was almost certain he heard male laughter. He stood motionless for a moment, his head angled toward the door, his right ear almost against the panel. It was odd, these games they'd begun to play. It was the money, no doubt. To Donnie, he was a goldmine: even if she wasn't overcharging him, he was one hell of a regular; and so, even though it visibly annoyed her that old Mickelsson was always there, like God—annoyed her that he should spy on her, feel jealous of her, run on and on about his worries concerning her, her seeming lack of all normal connections (parents, young friends), her seeming indifference to the well-known dangers of her shady profession—she played along, ministered to his soul's prissiness as she would minister, if the profit seemed sufficient, to any other of her customers' kinks (he'd found bite marks on her shoulder one night—broken skin, ugly swelling, such a mess that he'd begged her to go see a doctor, which of course she'd refused to do), so that now, because it was Mickelsson calling to her, she claimed, like some maiden of the suburbs, to be taking a bath. No wonder the pustuled, crooked-toothed, hairy beast beside or on top of her laughed! Shamelessly, absurdly, Mickelsson went along with his own side of the stupid pretense. “How long will you be?”

Murmured consultation. Perhaps they purposely made themselves heard, to mock him, to let him know no one was fooled, neither there in Donnie Matthews' big, dingy apartment nor anywhere else in Susquehanna.

“Make it an hour,” she called.

“OK, good,” he said, nodding formally, actually reaching, in the dim, filthy hallway, for the brim of his hat. “Ten o'clock.” He turned, scowling angrily, gripped the cane by the shank, just below the head, and started down the stairs.

The streets of Susquehanna were quiet, unusually empty. After the last few days' heavy storms—rain that had torn away most of the leaves, transforming the mountains from riotous color to the ominous slate gray of high, rolling waves in some sombre Winslow Homer—the weather had turned cold, so cold that tonight bits of ice shone like quartz in the darkness of asphalt and brick underfoot, on the walls of buildings, on the electric and telephone lines draped across the street, stretching away like a staff without notes toward the dully glowing iron bridge, the perfect blackness of the river below. He turned in that direction, deciding against the tavern up the hill, source of the only sound he could hear in all the town, or the only sound except the dull clunk that reached his ear each time the traffic-signal turned from red to green. People were laughing, back there in the tavern, and the jukebox was playing, so far away, all of it, it might have been sounds from his childhood.

At the bridge he turned left, moving toward the unlit, broad, flat span that had once been Susquehanna's famous depot, engine-repair station, and restaurant. The sign, up above his head, dimly lit by stars—
COMING SOON! SUSQUEHANNA PLAZA!
—was cracked and chipped, getting hard to read, like the rusty old sign one saw on the way in from Highway 81,
VACATION IN THE ENDLESS MOUNTAINS
. As he looked up at the sign, his eyes, without willing it, made a sudden shift to the stars beyond, the dusty white light of the Milky Way. Something bright, diamond-like, moved slowly across the sky from west to east, maybe an airplane without the usual lights, more likely some Russian or American satellite, Telstar, or whatever: odd that he no longer had any idea what was up there. He remembered—he hadn't thought of it in years—what excitement everyone had felt in the beginning, in the days of Sputnik I and Sputnik II, the martyred dogs, the great American end-over-end flopper: days of miracle!—the arrival of Christ in Glory could not have been more astonishing than the passage of those sparks across the heavens, one of them mournfully blinking on and off. They would stand in their yards, in suburbs and small towns or in the stillness of farm pastures all over America, looking up like sheep, empty hands hanging down beside their pockets; here and there some father with a child in his arms would point up, whispering in awe, “See, Timmy?” or “See, Mark? See?” and the child would gaze solemnly at the finger.

“The heavens declare the glory of God,” Mickelsson's grandfather would intone dryly, and Mickelsson's father would sit beaming in his pew, far more convinced than the old man in the pulpit that it was so, though Mickelsson's father would not definitely acknowledge God's existence. “Could be,” he would say, when pressed, “could be.” He believed in cats around the milkcan cover on the cowbarn floor, where he sploshed warm, new milk; believed in pines—he'd planted thousands of them—Canadian geese, slow-swaying Holsteins moving up a lane, heavy old Belgians pulling the log-sled. … Sometimes on Sunday afternoons, if Mickelsson had no highschool football game, the whole family would drive to the state hospital to visit his uncle, who'd gone crazy in the war. “Shell-shock,” the family said, and everyone would nod sympathetically; but somehow Mickelsson had known the first time his grandmother said it that for some reason she was not telling the truth. It was not until many years later that he'd learned what had really happened. “Poor dear,” his mother said, “it's a shame he couldn't have died right there! What a burden to carry all the rest of your life!”