Nickel Mountain (30 page)

“All together,” he yelled, putting a cookie in his mouth, raising his arms.

And all at once, probably out of pure shock at first, they were doing it, cold sober as they were. And then a vast and meaningless grief replaced the shock. Tears streamed down Lou Millet's face, and he was choked up so badly he couldn't bring out more than every fourth word. In the beginning there were only three voices—Henry's, Old Man Judkins', Jim Millet's—then more: Emery Jones' hired man singing tenor, almost soprano but in harmony; Ben Worthington, Jr., whining out baritone, sweat running down his throat; even George Loomis more or less singing, with a pained expression, droning like the bad note on a banjo. Lou Millet stood up. They were singing it through again, but it seemed to have come to him that he had to get home, it was foolishness sitting here half the night, his wife at home alone with the kids. He left, hurrying, and after a minute Ben Worthington, Jr., picked up his wallet and followed him out. Old Man Judkins stood up after that, and then Jesse Behmer. Henry stood in the middle of the floor like a giant, slowly bobbing up and down waving his arms. His forehead shone and the belly of his shirt was pasted to his skin.

Behind him, his face as solemn as his father's—but solemn without weight, like a serious toy—Jimmy bobbed up and down too, quickly and lightly, waving his arms.

When midnight came, only George Loomis was still there. Henry sat down, panting, sucking air in and out through his mouth. Callie brought him a pill. “Well!” he said. He tried to laugh, but he couldn't get his breath.

For a long time after that nobody spoke. Finally George Loomis said solemnly, “Whooey.”

“What's that supposed to mean?” Henry said.

George Loomis looked at the ceiling. “I don't know.”

Then George said: “But I'll tell you something. I'm beginning to believe in the Goat Lady.” He said it lightly, but a hint of uneasiness came over him as soon as it was out.

“You saw her, didn't you,” Callie said at once, knowing the direct accusation would shock him but suddenly not caring.

George went white.

“What happened?” Callie said.

They sat like people precariously balanced over a chasm, and everything depended on what George decided. Henry sat blankly, pulling at the fat below his chin, not eating the cookie he held in his left hand. George Loomis stared at his cigarette. He could tell them and be free (she saw what he was thinking) but then he would never be free again, because then there would be somebody who knew his guilt, shame, embarrassment, whatever it was. Except that maybe that was what it was to be free: to abandon all shame, all dignity, real or imagined. She remembered the funeral for George's mother, how they'd lowered the coffin carefully as if to preserve even in death her decorous, more than bodily virginity, and how they'd put the dirt in gently to avoid cracking the window through which the blind earth stared at her face.

At last George said, “No. I never saw her.” He stood up.

Henry looked at him, pitying him, George Loomis no more free than a river or a wind, and, as if unaware that he was doing it, Henry broke the cookie in his hand and let the pieces fall. She realized with a start that it was final: George had saved them after all. She felt herself going weightless, as though she were fainting. And something said in her mind, as though someone stood behind her, whispering hurriedly in her ear:
Nevertheless, all shall be saved.
She thought:
What?
And again:
All. Everything. Even the sticks and stones. Nothing is lost.
She thought:
How? Why should sticks and stones be saved?
But the waking dream was passing quickly, a thing so fragile that she would not even remember tomorrow that she'd had it. The room was suddenly filled with ghosts, not only Simon, but Henry's father, huge as a mountain and gentle as a flower, and Callie's great-great-grandfather, with his arm suspenders, an almanac closed over one finger, and Old Man Kuzitski, drunk as a lord, and Mrs. Stamp, irascible and pretty, with a blue-black umbrella, and arthritic, bushy-browed old Uncle John, and there were more, a hundred more she didn't know, solemn and full of triumphant joy; and the space in front of the diner was filled, from the door to the highway to the edge of the woods, and the woods were full, an enormous multitude solemn and triumphant, and she saw in the great crowd the pink and purple (transformed, magnificent, regally solemn) of the Goat Lady's cart. They vanished. Henry stood out by the gas pumps now, gray-looking and old in the pinkish glow of the neon. She saw the lights of George Loomis's truck go on and watched him back down toward the road, then pull forward, turning. She watched his taillights move up the hill and, dipping over the top, snap out. Henry came back.

“What
did
happen?” she asked in the amazing stillness.

“I don't know,” he said.

“Do you think the Goat Lady—?”

“I don't know.”

Jimmy lay asleep below the cash register, like something (a bag of potatoes) turned in as a trade. Henry lifted him gently, without waking him, while Callie locked the door and turned out the lights.

Sometime during the night, while they all slept, missing it, or missing anyway the spectacular beginning that they'd surely earned the right to see
(but the dog saw it, rising slowly to his feet and tilting his gray, giant head),
thunder cracked, shaking the mountains, and it rained.

VII

THE MEETING

1

It wasn't until he was already aboard and looking around him in the twilight of the coach that Willard Freund realized he'd forgotten to wire ahead to tell them which train he'd be on. The ticket had taken almost all the money he'd had, all but two dollars. If he had to spend the night in Utica it would have to be on one of the wooden benches at the station. But there was nothing he could do about it now. He took a seat near the rear of the half-empty car and settled himself for the trip. A red-headed old Welshman in a thin, threadbare coat with the collar turned up watched him with dim, angry eyes from across the aisle. One of the two middle-aged women talking about the blizzard and the lateness of the train, a few seats ahead of him, craned her neck around the side, like a chicken, to look at him. He pretended to stare through her.

His legs were cold already. By the time he got there he'd be frozen half to death. He pushed his hands into his overcoat pockets and remembered he'd brought the book,
Attack on Christendom.
He drew it out. He tried to read, but the shuffling and bumping of passengers moving down the aisle or settling themselves in the seats nearby distracted him. Worse yet, however hard he concentrated—now on the page, now on the strangers closing in on him, casual, determined, like a dog pack gradually encircling a sheep, his stomach churned with uneasy thoughts of home. At times it was a dull sorrow, at times a feeling of excitement mingled with anxiety, so intense he could hardly catch his breath.
Hypocrites,
he thought fiercely. It was a word that came more and more often to his mind, or rather, came between his mind and what threatened him: his mother and father living together all these years with no love between them, his father faithful to his mother out of cowardice, or habitual indifference, the way he was faithful to the Lutheran Church. And the neighbors were no better, however highly they thought of themselves. Philistines, brainless conformists. Sick.

He closed his eyes. None of that was true.

Now the train started up, so smoothly that, as always, it seemed at first the station that was moving. And still he was unable to read. He couldn't stop hearing the mumble of the wheels, steady and endless as banjo music, or watching the snow hitting the window to his right and sticking to the pane. He watched the gray buildings of Albany flitting past beyond the snow, then smaller houses with Christmas trees, then hills, luminous in the twilight, then the houses and crossings of small towns. The train stopped often, and passengers got on or got off, the same thing again and again, as in a nightmare: the murmur of voices, the glimpses of waiting or hurrying figures, the woman from the Salvation Army with her bell, the snow beating endlessly at the window. At last, entering the mountains—the train seemingly hanging suspended in darkness, then jolting suddenly, swaying on a curve—the churning in his stomach settled a little. He read for thirty minutes, then dozed and dreamed he was a child riding beside his father on the bobsled, hauling in wood. The dream was pleasant at first, but little by little it changed until at last, looking up at his father, he realized that though he sat erect, his hat seemingly brushing the stars, he was dead. He awakened with a start and for an instant thought the train was falling into some wide, deep gorge. When the brief panic subsided, he pressed his face to the window, raising his hands to the sides of his forehead like blinders, and saw snow and dead-looking trees standing in a desolate lake. He leaned back in his seat, his stomach churning so badly now that he thought he might have to vomit.

Except for the flickering red globes over the doors, the car was dark. As he looked, the conductor opened the door, letting in the suddenly loud rumble of the wheels, and called, “Utica, twenty minutes.” He came through the car, swaying, light blanking out the lenses of his glasses, and when he reached Willard's seat he leaned toward him, his face chalk-white, and said again mechanically, “Utica in twenty minutes.” Willard nodded with a jerk, as though he had not registered at first. He thought again, “All I have is two dollars,” and sat rigid, shivering in the cold, his lips pressed together tightly, until he saw the lighted tar paper and asbestos fake-brick shacks at the outskirts of the city. He got up then, reached his suitcase down from the rack, and worked his way to the door. He felt the others watching him, and hurried.

As he stepped down between the two cars the wind snatched at him as if to tear him away from earth and bear him off into the void, but he caught hold of the cold doorpost and, clinging to it, pressing down the skirt of his overcoat with the side of his suitcase, stepped onto the platform and into the shelter of the building. On the train steps the wind had been fierce, but under the overhang there was a lull. He put down the suitcase and drew a deep breath of the cold, snowy air, and standing not far from the door he looked around the platform and the lighted station. The storm whistled between the wheels of the car, through the metal scaffolding, and around the corner of the building. A mail wagon creaked past him, barely missing the corner of his suitcase, and men moved back and forth, laughing and talking, in snowy coats and hats. Beyond the corner of the station men and women piled suitcases into waiting cars, shouting through the snowy darkness. The big doors behind him swung open and shut continually, and muffled figures darted by covered with snow. An angry voice shouted, “Which car for Batavia?” and he caught a brief glimpse of a bearded, scarred face. Then steam hissed, billowing around the wheels of the train, and the cars began to move. He glimpsed faces in the windows. Then suddenly he was looking at the tracks beyond and covered walks and signal scaffolds and darkness. When the swaying red light of the last car was swallowed up by the night, he turned to go in.

In the huge vaulted room there was no one he knew. People sat solemn-faced and bored on the pew-like benches, not talking, bundled in their coats and scarves. There was a two- or three-year-old boy in a snowsuit lying asleep beside a fat woman, and for an instant Willard's chest went light.

He was thinking of his illegitimate child, whom he'd never seen. He wondered uneasily whether he would see him this time. He looked away. Across the room there was a green metal rack of newspapers. He hurried over to it, running from one painful thought to another—from the child to the Bomb. Willard Freund inclined more and more to believe—though at times he knew it was foolishness—that the stupidity of mankind, and maybe especially the stupidity of American democracy, was going to destroy the world—and soon. Though normally he was shy, not talkative, more times than once he had gotten a little drunk and had talked about it with fraternity brothers at Albany, sitting in the dimly lit lounge with a stack of 45's on the changer—Tchaikovsky's
Pathétique,
Stan Kenton's
Innovations
—a cigarette hanging un-lighted between his lips, head and shoulders thrown forward (image from some movie, Marlon Brando, maybe)—had teased the thought toward probability, half-aware as he spoke that his loss was more personal than he was telling them. His father's barn was the largest in the county, vaulted above like an airplane hanger, the cowbarn, below, as long and wide as a gymnasium. His father's hired men moved in and out between cows like factory workers, shifting milking machines, throwing open the chutes that brought down hay, or moving the milkcans on stainless steel wagons to the cooler. He had told his father the girl was pregnant, he intended to marry her. His father had laughed, then looked at him hard, and then, without warning, had slapped his face. “Don't mix up pussy and business,” he'd said, and Willard Freund had been filled with rage and shame—because it was true, he did not love her, though the sight of the Stop-Off made him ache with desire till Henry Soames' filthy shanty and diner, once for him a haven against the mechanized, cold-blooded, money-grubbing evil of
W. D. Freund and Sons Dairy Farms,
had become what it looked like to the casual eye, a seedy, rundown dingle of temptation and witchcraft. Stinging with rage, he'd snatched off the nearest milkcan cover and had thrown the can on its side so the milk came gushing out, thick and steaming. His father had bellowed and backed away a step, afraid of him, and Willard, crying now, had fled from the barn. He might have won, if he'd pushed, exactly as, later, he'd won the right to quit Ag school and become an English major. But he'd gone back to Cornell, had gone on getting letters from her, and, sick with indecision, had done nothing. Though he profoundly hated his father for it, his father was right: The God-spouting, hymn-singing, ne'er-do-well Welsh were not his kind of people. So he was ashamed of himself, yes; shocked at himself. But he talked drunkenly of politicians, kings of self-interest, and businessmen, shallowest, coarsest of men. And as he talked—he who had been all his life so quiet—he had thought, in horror, of his friend or once-friend Henry Soames, eccentric hermit, how Henry would sometimes get carried away and start babbling like a madman or drunkard. People smiled, made a circle in the air beside their heads, said: “Bonkers.” Suddenly, remembering Henry Soames, Willard would stop talking, would pull at his upper lip (that too he'd gotten from Henry), and would bite his lips together and squint. “Freund, what's really eating you?” some fraternity brothers would occasionally ask. Though they talked day and night about their sexual conquests, he couldn't tell them. He'd told at Cornell, when he was there, and it was horrible.
I want to be a child again,
he thought.