Mickelsson's Ghosts (25 page)

He felt a pang of regret that he'd so casually violated those generations of decisions: happy renovation, then gradual, almost unnoticed declines; regret even that he'd scraped away the hex sign on the door between the livingroom and kitchen. “Well, no matter,” he told himself aloud, then stopped to listen.

The house around him was as still as a dried-out seashell.

He looked at the pieces of wallpaper again, startled for some reason. A tingling came over him, some chemical change that increased rapidly, then came rushing up his spine like a spring bursting out into the light through the side of the mountain. The room changed its color and a rumble filled his ears: it was as if he were fainting. He reached out to steady himself and had the illusion, all at once, that he was seeing the whole history of the house: weddings, funerals, births, deaths, battles. … In the rush of images one detail stood plain: a boy with gloved hands throwing a poisoned, apparently dead rat into the stove, then widening his eyes, covering his ears against the animal's screams. Pain shot through Mickelsson, as if he himself had become the burning rat—but it was something else, something that doubled him over and filled him—filled the whole room—with a high wind of emotion, something like insane rage. Almost at once, the feeling subsided, the vision passed.

He stood blunt-witted, motionless, staring at the vivid bits of wallpaper. All was well; silent. He could hardly believe the thing had happened to him—certainly nothing like it had ever happened to him before. He felt frozen, as when one awakens from a nightmare unable to move a finger—the body's memory of ancient millennia, someone had once claimed; the stillness that saved our small forebears from passing sabretooths.

It came to him that he must have fallen asleep on his feet. It was a dream.

Now he was able to move again, first his hands, then his shoulders and head. His spine felt icy.

He shook his head, staring hard at the pieces of wallpaper, sorting them like cards, unconsciously testing, he realized after a moment, like a child fearfully teasing a snake behind glass to see if it will strike. Nothing, not the faintest stirring now. He closed his eyes, reaching up to rub the back of his neck where it ached as if from a cramp, and remembered Tim Booker's joke about the man who'd stayed in the house all night “and his
hair
turned white.” For some reason—as if, without his help, his mind were snatching at alternatives to the nightmare—he thought of the swan-and-water-lily wallpaper in his bedroom when he was a child. Blue, white, and silver. He remembered his grandmother combing her long hair, then remembered his bachelor uncle's cough, at six in the morning, when he got up and dressed and, grumbling to himself in Swedish, went out to start chores.

Still a little shaky, but oddly sober, Mickelsson wandered again to the livingroom, squinting, trying to call back more. It was as if he'd buried the nightmare already, deep in the gloomiest room of the brain's ancient dungeon. He sat down, sucking at his pipe, unaware that it was out. His stomach was filled with dead butterflies.

He thought of Jessica Stark, the remarkable way she'd smiled when he took her hand, reopening possibilities. He must tell her about all this—the two men on the road, the trucks, the hex that was a face. …

He remembered something more: his grandfather, one gray afternoon, standing in his black suit at the rural mailbox, a package of newly arrived books under one arm, probably more volumes of Martin Luther. His head was tilted, listening to faraway, muffled thunder as if he imagined the thunder to be speaking.

Suddenly the thought broke through again: What was behind that sudden, dreadful nightmare? Just some childish image of death? Small-boy idea of Hell?

What of the possibility he'd been stubbornly refusing to acknowledge all this while: that it had not been a nightmare? He raised his drink.

When he'd sipped, he check-reined his head back, trying to work out the crick in his neck, and the next thing he knew he was sitting on the couch with his two hands closed lightly around the whiskey glass, and outside the windows it was mid-day. He'd been dreaming something, some room full of beautiful colors. Someone had said, “I'm sure you're not guilty!” Moving his head by accident, not yet awake, he'd shattered the dream, scattered it back into electrons. He would never dream that exact same dream again.

8

Thomas's Hardware was the most prosperous business, possibly the only prosperous business, in Susquehanna. Owen Thomas, the proprietor, was shy and retiring, fine-featured, scholarly, a man of forty or so, with a daughter majoring in art at Penn State, whom he mentioned proudly, with careful restraint, whenever reasonable opportunity arose. The store was a pleasant place, bright and airy, for though it was crammed with goods—tools, rope, pipefittings, hasps and hinges, woodstoves, picture frames, drawer after drawer of bolts, screws, nails, racks and display cases of fishing equipment, Coleman stoves, hunting knives and guns—it had sixteen-foot ceilings of light gray stamped tin and large, uncluttered front windows. It looked out on the parking meters, broken asphalt, and worn red brick of Main Street, beyond that a waist-high stone wall and then nothing, a sunlight-filled drop-off where thirty years ago one would have seen the grand vaults and arches of a turn-of-the-century depot, at one end of it a restaurant of glass and wood, said to be one of the finest in America. In the failing antique store a block up the street, there were yellowing pictures of the restaurant: grand Victorian gables and cupolas, tables so elegant they seemed to float, and beyond the far windows a spectacular view of the river. Studying the pictures in the dust-specked dimness of the antique store, Mickelsson had understood, in a kind of daydream, exactly what the town had been like in those days, how the huge old houses on the side of the mountain—now gray and warping, every shutter askew—had been mansions then; how the brick streets had rung with the
tock
of horses' hooves and the whispered chatter of early cars. Susquehanna had been, he'd heard somewhere, a repair station for steam locomotives. Money had poured in, and pride of place. It must have seemed to the people of the town that it could never change, a settlement so glorious and well-to-do, so solidly established. Those who worked for the railroad, whether as linemen or as railroad engineers or as officials in sunlit offices filled with large, brass-studded leather chairs, had been heroes; it was the weak younger brothers who ran the post office, the barbershop, the hardware store. Now those heroes—except for the richest, who'd moved away—were employees of their once-humbler neighbors, the pharmacist, the man who sold household appliances, the people who ran the declining lumberyard, the real-estate office, the dry-goods store. “Vanity, vanity, all is vanity!” the preachers sang here as in other towns, or so Mickelsson imagined, recalling the great, spare church of his childhood. He imagined the people all nodding in solemn assent.

Mickelsson looked through wallpapers, borrowed four books to take home with him and think about, then bought white latex paint and two rollers, a dropcloth, and a plastic mixing pail. While the woman at the register rang them up, he caught sight of the tools on the wall along the left-hand side—saws, hammers, files, such a wealth of power-tools that for a moment, somewhat to Mickelsson's surprise, farmboy greed leaped up in him. His father and uncle had spent all their lives building and unbuilding, converting barns from one use to another, horsebarn becoming chickenhouse, sheepfold becoming pig-shed—or constructing inventions of one sort or another, first drawing pictures far into the night at the round oak diningroom table: a heavy wooden frame with a track-slide loader for the buzz saw, a double-gated contraption for loading sheep, clunky wood-and-iron gadgets to fit on tractors or trucks or to lift his grandmother's wheelchair onto the porch. It occurred to him only now that all that labor had been play, however solemn their faces, however they complained about time and the work still awaiting them. Lifting a sabre-saw, feeling the heft of it, Mickelsson recognized his hand as his father's hand. They were the same size and shape and had much the same freckled redness; the only real difference was that his father's hand had always been barked, scabbed, cracked, and calloused, always at least one fingernail discolored by some mishap. He remembered a chest his uncle and father had let him help them make when he was seven or so, a pine chest longer and deeper than a coffin, no nails or screws, just wooden pegs, locust. It had served as a windowseat through most of his childhood; later they'd used it to hold cow-feed. In the bright, pleasant-smelling hardware store, the discovery that his father and uncle, all those years, had been playing, enjoying themselves—making art, in a way—came over Mickelsson like an awakening. He felt an extravagant inclination to pity himself. What foolishness his life was, in comparison to theirs! But the likeness of his hand to his father's hand distracted him, made him feel, almost unwillingly, a surge of joy.

When he looked up from his daydream he saw Owen Thomas and a customer, a man in a hunting jacket and a Wheel-Horse cap, sorting through a tray of small, brightly colored plastic objects, something to do with electricity, just a little way down the aisle. When Thomas smiled at him, politely nodding, Mickelsson held up the sabre-saw and said, “Fine collection of tools you got here!”

“Cost you an arm and a leg these days,” Thomas said, smiling privately, more shy than before. It was clear that he knew how Mickelsson felt. Maybe it was a similar feeling that had kept him in the hardware business, made him run it so well. For that matter, maybe it was that feeling for objects well-made, tools both beautiful in themselves and in their uses, that had inclined Owen Thomas's daughter toward art school. Again he saw the present lining up with the past, like one image superimposed on another.

Thomas straightened up, holding out a handful of the plastic things to his customer, who looked them over through the bottoms of his bifocals, apparently counting them, his mouth fallen open, showing yellow stump teeth, then took the objects into his two cupped hands, nodding, still looking a little baffled, and carried them to the register. Thomas came over to Mickelsson. “How's that place of yours coming?” he asked.

“Lot of work to be done,” Mickelsson said. He smiled.

“I guess there would be,” Thomas said. Though he pretended to speak ruefully, he obviously understood Mickelsson's pleasure in the prospect of getting at it. “I guess the doc never had much time for fixing things. Mostly hired kids around town. You know how that is.”

Mickelsson chuckled, man to man, still pleasantly conscious of the smooth metal handle of the sabre-saw in his fist. He lifted one eyebrow and lowered his voice. “You wouldn't believe that place,” he said. When Thomas glanced up at him, he continued still more softly, “Not a wood-screw in the house that wasn't slammed in like a nail!”

Thomas smiled and shook his head. He seemed prepared to draw away, as if afraid he was imposing, but for the moment, tentatively, he remained where he stood. Mickelsson couldn't help but think it was because the man felt friendly toward him. If so, it was mutual. Even at the university—perhaps especially at the university—there was no man Mickelsson felt more comfortable passing the time with. He said, glancing back at the rack of tools, “I oughtta buy everything you've got here. I haven't got a thing, up on the hill. Been living in apartments.”

“That's one thing about houses,” Thomas said, “there's always something needs fixing.”

On impulse, furtively, as if Ellen might walk in on him, Mickelsson took a screw-driver from the rack, then a pair of pliers, then a wreckingbar. Frowning, making a difficult decision, he studied the handsaws. Thomas reached up and drew one from its hook, wiped a speck of dust from it with the tip of his finger, and held it toward him, handle first. “If you're not a real full-time carpenter …” he said, and let his words trail off.

For the next twenty minutes, increasingly pleased with himself, though increasingly anxious as well, Mickelsson—with Thomas giving advice when he needed it—chose tools. When they took them, together, to the register and added them up—skill-saw, sabre-saw, electric drill, hammer, wrenches, dust-mask and goggles, level … more tools of various sorts and sizes than Mickelsson had ever owned before—he found, not really to his surprise, that he'd spent two hundred dollars. He had half a mind to have Thomas throw in an electric belt-sander, but he decided he could wait. It even crossed his mind, as he stood idly waiting, his hand resting on the wallpaper books, that maybe he ought to get a rifle. Why not? His father had taken him hunting as a boy; the memory rose in his mind with wonderful vividness—creeks, trees, sunlight, squirrels scampering along high, leafy branches, the sky bright blue, like the ceiling at his parents' church. He'd never been hunting since. Ellen had hated guns. Her irrational fear of them had gotten under his skin, her weird conviction—only now did he fully realize how weird it was—that Mickelsson was a man too dark-spirited and moody to be safe with a rifle in the house. He shook his head. Odd what a man could take for reasonable and natural, if the poison was slipped in subtly enough, over a long enough period of time. Nevertheless, he would not buy the rifle, handsome as it was with its blue-black barrel and gleaming, machine-carved stock. He had far too much to do to be thinking of hunting. He got out his checkbook and took a ballpoint pen from beside the cash-register. Strange to say, though he'd been trying to live dirt-cheap these last months, skimping even on groceries to justify having bought the Sprague place and sending all he could to Ellen, whose expenses seemed greater than ever these days, Mickelsson, parting with two hundred dollars (Thomas had rounded off the bill), felt jubilant.

As he made out the check he said, “Owen, I meant to ask you. What would I do about getting a well drilled?”