Mickelsson's Ghosts by John Gardner (guided reading books .TXT) 📕

remember that first encounter later, when the descent no longer seemed so frighteningly steep—passed through a cavern of interlocked trees and fog, curved around abruptly, and emerged into strange, charged light. It was not at all the light of Wisconsin. If the light there was unearthly, it had a luminous, strained, Scandinavian unearthliness, so that it seemed no wonder that men like his grandfather (before the coming of his gift) should ponder God—even God’s love and grace—in a fashion almost chillingly logical, respectful; and that even common grocers should carry about them an aura of the scholarly, a wintry crispness and clarity that one might mistake—here among the yellows and misty greens of Pennsylvania—for icy-hearted. He slowed, the car’s weight laboring against the brakes, pulled the rumbling old Chevy onto the shoulder, and switched off the engine, knowing though not yet quite believing that this was the place he’d discovered in the Snyder Realty brochure (“Beautiful old farmhouse, 4 bedrooms, outbuildings, pond, woods, pasture”). After a moment he got out to stand beside the blue, pitted fender, looking down at his prospect from a quarter-mile away and a hundred yards above. The engine clicked noisily. There were blackberries by the roadside, grown up in profusion as if to hide the broad scar of an abandoned gravel pit with a chain across what remained of the entrance and a sign, NO DUMPING! He picked a handful of berries and absently ate them as he looked. He could now see the realtor’s red and white sign.

“Son of a gun,” he muttered, and shook his head.

Long blue shadows reached from the woods above down the cant of the mountain—pale, new-mown hay—toward the house and barns. Between the house and the nearest shed, a creek glittered, and directly above the house, startling as a wolf in the late-afternoon light, stood a perfect, white full moon.

Finney, his lawyer, would stage one of his grand-operatic fits when he heard the price. “Listen, pal. Take an old goat-fucker’s word for it—” he would say.

Mickelsson wiped his hands on his handkerchief, climbed back into the car, put the gearshift in neutral, and coasted nearer. In front of the house he pushed in the brake, took off his glasses and cleaned them, then fitted them back over his ears.

The lawn was mowed, the barndoors padlocked. The owner was apparently not at home—so he gathered, though he didn’t get out of the car, much less go up onto the wide, shaded porch and knock. From beyond the largest of the barns, behind him, across the road from the house, came the roar of a waterfall.

He slid out a cigarette, tamped it on the dashboard, cupped his hands around the end, and lit it.

Everything below the porch roof lay in shadow, and the gables, now that he looked at them more closely, had a knife-cut sharpness of outline that touched him with foreboding. Beyond the gables the wooded mountain was as gray as a chalkboard, rising into mist. He noticed now for the first time—or anyway for the first time consciously registered—the Pennsylvania-Dutch hex signs on the barns.

The design of the spindles on the porch balusters, just visible in the dark, still wedge of shadow, was unusually complex, as if the spindles had been wrought for some old-world mansion, perhaps some grand old Victorian hotel for the very rich when they retreated for a weekend to the mountains. It was a beautiful place, no question about it, but the longer he looked the more ambivalent his sense of it became. Over by the plank bridge spanning the creek, just beyond a startling splash of lighted ferns, lay a shape he thought at first to be a bright clump of heather, until it moved, turning into a cat, gray and white, stalking.

The light changed again. The shadows behind the house and the darkening barns, spilling out across the valley, filling it like a cup, were more blue now, growing darker and bluer by the minute. It was that early span of twilight his father had called “cockshut,” back in that lost age when every slightest flicker of reality had a name—birds, grasses, weathers, times of day and season. The moon had grown brighter, as if sneaking in close. He waited on, breathing in the scents of new-mown hay and honeysuckle. His thoughts drifted. A faint chest-pain brought it to his attention that he was thinking of the student Michael Nugent. Already, it was clear, the boy had decided to make demands on him, urged on by Tillson, probably Dean Blickstein too, and whoever it was that had persuaded Nugent that he, Mickelsson, was the only “real” philosopher. I know how you live. I know how much—Mickelsson sucked in breath and moved the palm of his right hand on his chest. Surely the past should be sufficient trouble, his children and ex-wife; but no, the inevitable future must nag him too, pull like quicksand. Mickelsson had nothing but scorn for the so-called Me generation, emotivism at plague proportions; nonetheless it was true that there were times when a man could help no one. Here stood this house, possibility of escape—increasingly sombre in the deepening twilight—and there, all around it, to his imagination, were the stretched-out bony arms of those with legitimate demands.

He forgot what he’d been thinking.

The seeming timelessness was part of it, all right. (The thought welled up into his consciousness abruptly, after a lapse of perhaps minutes.) Dropped out of nowhere into this still shade, one couldn’t have known it wasn’t 1940—or even 1840, except for the electric and telephone lines, harsh against the sky.

Now the windows of the house were just darker places in the ghostly walls. The steep, stern gables, raised like old shields or defenseworks, dark against the darker mountainside, the darkening sky, had a look both forbidding and forlorn, the look of a stronghold that has outlasted its occupants by centuries. It was now no longer cockshut but purple dusk edging into night.

“Interesting,” he said aloud. Quite