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

after he’d abandoned theism—until suddenly the ground had dropped out from under him and he’d clearly grasped his situation.

He remembered his grandfather in his rose garden—a side of him Mickelsson hadn’t thought of for a long, long time. He remembered the old man, like a crooked-nosed black bird, bending over to sniff a flower. Was it possible that he’d simply been testing it by smell for some sickness—that he had no more feeling for scents than he had for children, dogs, or sunsets? Had he gotten any pleasure out of conceiving his own children—seven of them, only two of whom (Mickelsson’s father was the seventh) had survived?

The weather, when he’d gone up to the Bauer place, had been bright and crisp, much cooler in the mountains than down in Binghamton. The glen below the farmstead was full of restless bird movement and the sombre echo of waterfalls; up above, white luminous clouds hovered. Once the farm had been quite an operation, one could tell by the size of the empty barns; but that had been long ago. Now it came with only thirty acres. Dr. Bauer had lived here fourteen years, she said, and it had already been long past farming, grown up in wildflowers, brush, and woods, when she’d moved in.

She was a likeable person; a large, farmish woman whom everyone affectionately called “the doc.” She had the same owt’s and gaht’s as her neighbors, the same flattened vowels and enriched r’s. She worked at the grim, dark-brick local hospital (torn green windowshades on the office windows, in the patients’ rooms gray Venetian blinds), and nearly everyone he’d met in Susquehanna had at one time or another been helped by her. She was sixty, a dowdy dresser (she’d been wearing that day a light, countryish flowerprint dress of inexpensive material)—her bodily construction tall, squarish, heavy, her flesh queerly pale and soft. Something about her made Mickelsson suspect at once that she must be vegetarian. Except for that, the vegetarian look, if he’d met her on the street he’d have set her down as a well-to-do farmer’s wife, old-fashioned, no doubt religious. The hex signs on the barns, though more recently painted than the walls themselves—or touched up, perhaps—were so old and weatherworn they had to be the work of a previous owner—except that, he thought fleetingly, that hardly explained the relatively new one on the pleasantly crude Dutch door into the kitchen. What the hex signs meant he had no idea, nor could the doctor enlighten him, apparently. “Interesting, aren’t they?” she’d said, smiling. It was as if for her they were simply strange flowers that had one day, through no effort of hers, bloomed there, and seemed to do no harm. Mickelsson had his doubts. Each of them was set inside a circle of black, and Mickelsson knew enough of symbolism to be suspicious. But of course he hadn’t pressed her. All over that section of Pennsylvania, though they began in earnest farther south, there were hexes. He’d felt, if anything, a little pleased with himself for having found a place with special character; and except in those moods when nothing pleased him, he’d enjoyed that specialness more and more as time passed. (He would get up, mornings, after he’d moved in, and go out onto his lawn to watch the swallows lift and swoop, the martins step out of their high, red apartment house and fly heavily off to work, the fat catbird in the branches of the birchtree mewing crossly. Across the glen below his house, shadowy trees slowly darkened into view through their broad, low fogbank like ships drawing nearer. The yellow morning light—hitting the barns broadside, giving the old, faded hexes sharp detail—could fill Mickelsson, when depression wasn’t on him, with a wonderful satisfaction.) The doctor had no doubt felt the same when she’d lived here; had no doubt felt pleased, as he did now, when tourists stopped their cars and took pictures of the signs on the barns or the waterfall beyond. (In the large, unheated workroom that jutted out behind the house toward the rise of the mountain and the woods—a room Mickelsson intended to convert, as soon as he could afford it, into a large, formal diningroom, not that he expected to be having much company—he found evidence of the magic the doctor cared most about: a picture of Jesus in a crown of thorns, looking mournfully, with gentle Anglo-Saxon eyes, toward heaven.)

He’d walked up into the woods with her for a look at the old concrete reservoir, his water supply.

“I’m sure you won’t be having any trouble, Prahfessor,” she’d said. “It doesn’t exactly come gushing, but there’s only the one of you.” Her laugh was girlish, the laugh of someone perfectly at peace with the world.

Mickelsson had nodded, half smiling politely, standing precariously in his leather-soled shoes on the slope of crumbling shale and wet weeds, hatless today (he’d left his hat on the front seat of the Chevy), his red hair streaming as if angrily in all directions, tugged by the wind they’d found up here, the tips of his pink, freckled fingers in his tight trouser pockets. It was probably true that the water system had never given her, as she said, a speck of trouble. She had the look of one of the elect. For Mickelsson things would go otherwise. The two pipes visible above the dark, clear water had orange, cancerous-looking growths of rust; they would disintegrate at a touch. And the overflow pipe, just above the ground-line, was large enough for a rabbit to crawl through. Sooner or later some rabbit would try it, it was a foregone conclusion, and the water would be polluted. But Mickelsson knew from his farm childhood, when rats would occasionally drown in the cistern and swell obscenely, that polluted water did not necessarily mean instant death; it was more likely to mean just a little more unpleasantness in the general run: a taste and smell that would gradually build