Mickelsson's Ghosts, John Gardner [well read books .TXT] 📗

I was wondering is, since I’ve been doing really well so far—I mean I’ve read all the work, and I got an A-plus on the midterm, and I contributed to class discussions, as well as I could, so you know I was serious—”

Mickelsson could see where the plea was heading. He was tempted to bear down, demand that the boy be just a little reasonable, but something checked him. The emotion in Nugent’s voice was peculiar, different from anything he’d encountered before, even from poor mad Nugent. It was normal for students to plead for special favors; no doubt he’d done it himself in his college days, though he could remember no particular instance. But he somehow had a feeling that Nugent’s distress was far beyond the usual, as if passing the course without writing the term paper or the final exam were a matter of life or death. And there was something else. The boy sounded changed, as if his mind had weakened, or he was drugged, fighting for coherence.

“A midterm exam is not exactly the same as a final,” Mickelsson said, stalling. As soon as he’d said it he knew that by his tone he’d let Nugent know that the matter was still negotiable. He must quickly correct that impression, he thought, but then cringed guiltily from a mental image of timid, anxious Ed Lawler. “Do you think he seems well?” Mickelsson hadn’t realized even then, with Lawler forcing his head to it, the full extent of Nugent’s illness.

“Professor Mickelsson,” Nugent said, rushing in, his voice tremulous, “I know it’s not fair to ask—I mean, I know it’s abnormal—” He gave an awful laugh.

Though he couldn’t have said for sure how he knew it, he knew that Michael Nugent was crying. Christ! he thought, momentarily enraged, put upon one too God damn many times. But then instantly, for no good reason, he thought of Mark. “Listen, Michael,” he said, almost as gently as he’d have spoken to his son, “what’s wrong? What’s all this about?”

Nugent said nothing. Mickelsson imagined him struggling for control, fighting the random contortions of his mouth, crying as Ellen had sometimes cried when she phoned, back in the days when she’d sometimes phoned. He felt a kind of sickness sweep over him, a strange and baffling feeling like absolute despair, the very soul’s prostration. He knew what he should say, that he would give the boy an Incomplete, it was the best he could offer. Nothing else made sense, logically at any rate; but logic seemed not relevant. The boy’s anguish, whatever its cause, was so strong that Mickelsson could feel it himself, a sensation of teetering on the rim of the abyss. The power of Nugent’s distress was shocking, unheard-of. He said, “Suppose I give you a B-plus for the course, scrap the rules this once. Would that do?”

“That’d be fantastic,” Nugent said. The way he snapped at it made Mickelsson more uneasy than before.

“Listen,” Mickelsson said, “come talk to me next semester, all right? I must say, I was hoping you’d pull an A.”

Nugent said nothing.

“Michael?” Mickelsson said.

There seemed to be no one on the line.

After he’d hung up, he thought, still feeling queasy, almost nauseous, how peculiar it was that he’d so easily caved in, not that even now he regretted it; his sense of Nugent’s helplessness and misery was still very strong. No doubt he should have demanded that the boy at least give his excuse, he thought. But the thought was no more than a dutiful flicker; he felt, beyond reason or argument, that he’d done the only thing he could have done.

An hour later he still hadn’t gotten the strangeness of it out of his mind. All his own troubles, confusing, unsolvable, oppressive as they were, seemed trivial beside Nugent’s, though Nugent’s hadn’t even a name.

What the connection was he couldn’t have said, though he sensed some definite connection: brooding on Nugent, he got a sharp image of his father and uncle and his father’s friend Hobart kneeling beside a Guernsey cow. The cow was bloated, lying on her side against a fencepost. All around her, up and down the field, there were other cows in the same helpless condition, stomachs swollen, eyes rolling, lips breathing foam. They’d gotten into wet clover, he knew now, though at the time he’d known only what he saw. He’d been four or five. His uncle pushed his fingers into the cow’s swollen side, just below the chine, no doubt counting down ribs, and then his father had raised a hunting knife—Mickelsson could see it so clearly it might have been a photograph—and stabbed with all his might. Foul air hissed out, spitting red-yellow liquid—a terrible, filthy mess—and the cow groaned, “Ooof!” In less than a minute the cow was on her feet, angrily tossing her head, mooing in high dudgeon, clumsily running away.

The memory released another. One winter night when Mickelsson was seven, he’d been awakened by a sound it had taken him a moment to identify: every cow in the barn was mooing, in eerie chorus. He’d gotten up and put his clothes on and had run into the kitchen—his bedroom was downstairs—just in time to see his father putting on his old tattered denim frock. They’d gone out to the barn together; a little later his uncle had come, red-nosed and dim-eyed, smelling of whiskey, his hands buried in the pockets of his sheepskin. The cows went on bawling, the strangest sound on earth, the sound reverberating in the big stone barn. His father had looked businesslike and solemn, moving along behind the gutters with his head bowed, trying to make out what the cows were telling him. When he came to the heavy piece of sheet-metal that made a bridge over the gutter, near the middle of the barn, the bellowing dropped off. Every cow’s head turned to watch. His father looked around, then down at the sheet-metal under his boots. When he and Uncle Edgar bent to