Nickel Mountain (20 page)

“What's that?” Henry had said.

George Loomis stared down into the night, leaning forward over the steering wheel, and he said, “You can't.”

“It's what drives you to God,” Henry said with a little laugh.

George too had laughed, like a murderer.

6

That same night, two hours after Jimmy's cry, Henry sat at his kitchen table, catching up his books. It was long past his bedtime. Normally he was careful to get to bed by ten, doctor's orders, but he knew it would be no use tonight. By now he felt downright panicky at what he'd done down in Slater. Even without any trimmings whatever, everything plain as plain could be (a thing old Wiegert seemed to find distressing), his bank account would be lighter by six hundred dollars. He couldn't believe he'd done it, now. Sweat ran down his chest, and the more he tried to think why he'd done it, the wilder it seemed. It would be one thing if he were all alone, no family to think about. He'd often acted on crazy whims before he'd married Callie. Maybe he'd gone un-married too long. It was hard as the devil to change the whole pattern of your life when you got to your forties.

The fog lay all around the house now, sealing it up like a box. At every window he saw his own reflection, but when he let his mind wander he was aware of the others; it was as if he could hear them breathing: Simon just on the other side of that door straight in front of him, Callie and Jimmy just up the stairs that opened onto the kitchen to his right. Outside, nothing moving. A hundred thousand birds would start singing when the sun came up, and in the valley cows would move in from their pastures toward lighted barns. In the fields, mice, woodchucks, rabbits, dogs would run, when dawn came, and the mountainsides would be rife with wild things, from squirrels to foxes—but just now, nothing. But no, that was wrong of course. Fog or no fog, everything was the same as always, animals stalking animals stalking animals in deadly procession, quiet as dreams.

She'd had plans for that money. He'd never agreed to Callie's plans, but it was settled between them that one of these days they would have it out; he'd had no right to spend six hundred dollars on something insane. Unless maybe that was why he'd done it: not for Simon's wife but against his own.

(He remembered vividly the way cows would push at the fences on his grandfather's farm. Even if you pastured them in clover and the other side was barely stubble, still they'd push to get out. He and his father and grandfather would go out in the middle of the night—two fat old men and a fat little boy—and they'd shout at the cows and turn them around with pitchfork handles, and the cows would go anywhere on earth but where you wanted them. When you finally got them to the open gate or the hole in the fence, you had to twist their tails to run them through.)

But that wasn't all of it. He remembered the way Callie had reached out, finally, and touched Simon Bale when he was crying.

The thought was comforting for a minute, but the next minute he wondered if he would have brought Simon here at all if it weren't for the others who'd stood above him doing nothing. There was a story about two old brothers named Sprague—a true story, Jim Millet said. They'd lived together in Slater all their lives, and when they were eighty they'd sold their house and moved down to Florida. Nobody knew them there, and the second day one of them killed the other with an axe, just like that, nobody ever learned why. It would never have happened if they'd stayed where they belonged, Jim Millet said. The man had never done a thing to cover up his crime. He'd carried the body to the garage and shut it up, and as soon as it started to smell, the neighbors found it.

The story was puzzling, and Henry leaned on his fists, frowning. He was still thinking about it when he dozed off. When he woke up again—he couldn't tell how much later—Simon Bale was standing over by the stove, blinking. He had on only his suitcoat and trousers, no shirt or undershirt, no shoes.

“Trouble sleeping?” Henry said.

Simon waved as if to say it was unimportant.

Henry squinted at him, wide awake now, and it was as if, seeing him here in his own kitchen where every pot and pan had its precise meaning, he was seeing Simon clear for the first time. It was like something that came to you early in the morning when you'd first gotten up: Compared to Callie's light blue apron, not a brute object but the sum of its associations, Simon Bale was old and sallow-faced and strangely bitter, maybe devious. Against the yellow of the walls he was tortuously old-fashioned, grim, as rigid as an angle iron. It made Henry's skin creep.

Simon stood with his big-knuckled hands at his sides, his belly out, chest caved in, head forward, looking at the coffeepot on the stove. He lifted the lid, saw that the pot was empty, and replaced the lid as if that too were of no importance. He came over and stood with his hands in his side pockets, looking disapprovingly at Henry's ledger. After a moment he drew out a chair, smiled apologetically, then looked grim again, and sat down.

“The house gets cold, these foggy nights,” Henry said.

Simon nodded and smiled.

For a long time after that neither of them spoke. Henry thought of mentioning the funeral, then thought better of it. Not mentioning it was pure cowardice, he knew: To tell Simon would be, in effect, to tell Callie. But Simon was completely uninterested in her burial, or so he said; as likely as not, he wouldn't even bother to go when Henry did tell him.

The muscles of Simon's face were working, and he had his eyes fixed on Henry's forehead. After a moment, with a darting motion, he drew a stack of small, white leaflets from his inside coatpocket. He leered and slid them across the table toward Henry, watch and wait! the top one said. The next said, who shall be saved? Under the title there were words in italics:
But why dost thou judge thy brother? or why dost thou set at nought thy brother? for we shall all stand before the judgment seat of Christ. (Rom. 14:10)
It was not what Henry would have expected; he would have expected, well, something about God's wrath, say, or the seven angels of doom. “Is this what Jehovah's Witnesses believe?” Henry said.

However mild the text, there was a spark of anger in Simon's eyes. “Not what we
believe,”
he said, “the
truth!”

“Yes, of course,” Henry said, looking down.

“Do you dare to deny the Judgment of the Lord?” Simon said. He was leaning forward now, his lower lip trembling. His fury seemed to Henry inexplicable, unwarranted by anything Henry had said.

“I don't deny anything,” Henry said.

“But there
is evil,”
Simon said. “Woe to that man—”

“Perhaps so,” Henry said sharply, cutting him off.

Simon looked at him for a long time, then at last bowed his head. “You have been kind to me, within the bounds of your understanding.” After another moment: “I am deeply grateful. May the Lord keep you, Mr.—” He seemed to cast about for Henry's name.

Henry winced, watching him closely, at once repelled and fascinated, like a man watching a rattlesnake behind glass.

“I accept your hospitality,” Simon said, suddenly smiling grotesquely, tears in his eyes. “God's will be done.”

7

The troopers came in the next afternoon and casually asked to speak with Simon. Behind the counter, Henry Soames stood thinking a moment, the lenses of his glasses blanking out his eyes. “I'll see if I can locate him,” he said. He rubbed the side of his nose, still thinking, and then, reluctantly, he left the diner to look.

He was a little on edge to start with, as he frequently was when Callie's mother decided to come down and help out. She'd been here most of the day again, busying herself when there was nothing to do, mopping the floor when it was perfectly all right, bending the old gray spoons back into shape, criticizing the electric potato peeler for eating up three-fourths of every potato. He wished she'd get down to what she'd come here to say, but she didn't, and gradually Henry was beginning to believe she had no intention of getting down to it. Maybe she figured she would drive out Simon Bale by just hanging around. Well, she figured wrong. When Henry asked her, “You seen Simon, Ellie?” she had looked surprised, as if she hadn't heard what the troopers had said, five feet from where she'd been careful to be standing, and she'd said, “Why, no, Henry, I been too busy. Does somebody want him?” Henry had nodded and hurried on by her.

Simon wasn't in the garden, this time, and when Henry called into the house he found he wasn't there either. “Why do you want him?” Callie called back, but Henry ignored her too. He started for the garage.

He didn't know what to think by now. Not just about the money, about the whole damn business, from the minute he'd first seen Simon Bale slumped down on the ground by his snow fence, and the people around him not moving a muscle. There was something he'd read, about a week ago: Some old man had been stabbed in New York City, it said in the paper, and there were fifteen people standing around and even when he asked them to, they never even called the police. It was hard to believe they'd all just stand there, fifteen of them, and not even one of them lift one finger, and he'd thought and thought about it. It didn't seem natural, and he'd tried to see it from their side, because if there was any way on earth to explain it, the secret had to be in those people's feelings. He could understand their not helping: afraid of the fellow with the knife. But to merely stand there like a herd of cows—it was past all comprehending. A man could turn into an animal, then. It was something about living in the city, that was all he could figure. And he
could
understand that, it came to him. He'd felt it himself one time in Utica. He'd never have believed there were that many people in all this world, especially that many poor people, burnt-out-looking; and walking in that crowd, looking at faces that stared right through him (no two faces in all that city exactly alike, each one marked by its own single lifetime of weathers, suppers, accidents, opinions), he'd felt a sudden disgust—or not even that, a calm disinterest, as though he were seeing it all with the eves of a thinking stone to whom all human life was nothing, to whom even his own life was nothing. If there were millions and millions of people in the world, they were nothing compared with the billions and billions already dead. But then he'd seen a man he knew, and he could hardly recapture, when he'd thought back to it later, that vision of people as meaningless motion, a stream of humanity down through time, no more significant than the rocks in a mountain slide. It was different in the country, where a man's life or a family's past was not so quickly swallowed up, where the ordinariness of thinking creatures was obvious only when you thought a minute, not an inescapable conclusion that crushed the soul the way pavement shattered men's arches. And so they had stopped being human. It was outrageous that it could happen, but maybe it did, and, worse, maybe it was the people in New York City that were right. What was pleasant to believe was not necessarily true. Elves, for instance, or Santa Claus, or what he'd never have doubted once, the idea that Henry Soames would live practically forever. He thought: Or angels. He could remember—it seemed like centuries ago, when he was four or five—lying in bed with his grandmother, looking at pictures in the
Christian Herald.
It was in an upstairs room in the big old house where his parents had lived, and outside the window there were pines moaning and creaking in the summer wind. She had told him about angels, and there had seemed no possible question of its not being true. Once, standing on a hillside watching the northern lights, he had seen an angel with absolute clarity—as clearly as, another time, he'd seen a great, round frying pan in the sky when he was looking for the Big Dipper. But then the evidence against them came in, piece by piece, fact after fact, until by sheer bulk the facts overwhelmed them, and what was good to believe—for the world was vastly more beautiful with angels than it was without—was incredible. He'd been right, then, at least in this: He wasn't acting
for
but
against
—Callie, Callie's mother, the people who said on no earthly grounds but animal distrust that Simon had burned his own house. And maybe he had, who knew? How far would Henry Soames go on what George Loomis would call pure meanness? He thought of the money and the sinking feeling returned. He was sweating again.

He found them behind the garage. He stopped when he saw them, and neither Simon nor Jimmy looked up. Simon was sitting on a tipped-over oil drum, writing something with a pencil on a piece of wood, and Jimmy was standing at his elbow watching. Henry stopped and it came to him that, close he was, they didn't realize yet that he was there. Jimmy was saying, “Why?” and Simon said, “Because he loves all little children, if they repent.” He spoke softly, insistently. Henry went cold all over. Jimmy said, “Who
is
God?” Henry said sharply, “Simon!”

The man jumped a foot, then instantly went into his obsequious cowering. He said, “H'lo.”

Henry said nothing. A muscle was jumping in his jaw, and his chest was churning so badly he could hardly get his wind. Jimmy looked up as if caught at something. At last Henry said, “The troopers would like to talk to you, Simon. In the diner.”

For a moment Simon seemed unable to make sense of the words, but then their meaning came through, and he stood up.

Henry waited with his hands behind his back, keeping his fury inside, and when Simon reached him, he turned and walked with him toward the diner. Jimmy started to follow, and Henry said, “You go back to the house.” The child opened his mouth to protest, but Henry pointed toward the house angrily and Jimmy started across the grass. By the time he reached the door he was crying.

“What were you making?” Henry asked abruptly.