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

and cupboards had been carelessly put up and came out easily. The sink was not much harder, and the panelling came off in three fierce yanks. The fiberboard ceiling panels broke away like cake, and, climbing once more onto his rickety chair, he began on the wallpapered plaster and lath. By four in the morning, when he was on his third glass of gin and the ceiling was half down, his neck and shoulders numb from his exertion, he began to make discoveries. (He’d turned off the staticky radio long since.) At the far end of the room every second beam was missing, and those that remained were support-braced and blackened by fire. Even more interesting was the fact that here, as nowhere else in the house, the nails were square. It was the oldest section, then, as he’d suspected. Probably this room and the attic above it were all there had been of the house for a good many years. No wonder it had gone through so many wallpapers, so many changes of function.

He worked in a kind of dream, almost a trance, the room so full of dust that he could barely see. He wore a mask over his nose and mouth, goggles over his eyes. His pipe and the glass of gin on the floor in the corner of the room he’d covered with his handkerchief. From time to time he stopped to replace the filter in the mask and clean the goggles, but increasingly it became an idle gesture: even with the door open, propped against the woodpile, the turbulent dust and floating wallpaper chips made the room so dark and murky it was like working at the bottom of the sea.

He would not remember later what thoughts came as he worked. After painting, sanding, making various fairly extensive repairs to the other rooms, he was used to the way the mind drifted freely when the body was engaged; but never before tonight had it been quite like this. It was not just the gin, the heavy darkness of dust through which he moved, wandering half lost in a room only fourteen by twenty—though both the gin and the dustcloud no doubt had their part in it. Lath and plaster, breaking away from the beams, opened squares of darkness like revelations. He stared deep into them but could see nothing, neither attic roof nor sky. With each tear-away of plaster and lath, dirt fell down into the room as from a shovel (he thought of Freddy Rogers’ stone falls), struck the floor with a thud, and billowed upward again, pushing up like smoke all around him. In his mind he saw the dog floating through weeds like a black swan on a lake, and saw Pearson marching along the mountain with his dowsing rod, his whole soul and body intent on the discovery theoretically impossible for him to make. Witchcraft drifted into Mickelsson’s mind and seemed to him normal, not surprising: he imagined Pearson bent over a table where there were gloves, perhaps fingernails, speaking the name of the person they belonged to, drawing her toward him through the night. He tried to think where he’d gotten that image—something he’d seen, or possibly something someone had told him. But nothing came. Pearson had been joking, no doubt; so Mickelsson had by now convinced himself. A “waterwitch,” maybe; not really a witch. Yet in the dark, dust-filled room it seemed clear that no joke was ever wholly or solely a joke, not even what Rogers had called the “kidding around” of the universe. Whatever it occurred to one to say—anyone—was at some level true. At any rate, this much seemed sure: that Pearson was at one with the world in a way Peter Mickelsson was not. He knew without looking where the dog had gone off to, knew even what was happening under the ground. He thought of Pearson’s words, “Most likely you see ’em and just don’t notice.” It was a theory that Mickelsson had encountered before, that psychic insights are for the most part trivial: a vague intrusion of someone else’s personality, foreknowledge of a speed-trap, or that a letter of no real importance will be waiting in one’s mailbox. His grandfather, after the arrival of his gift, had for the most part had visions as clear and detailed as applecrates on a hayrack, but there were times all he got was hunches, like the hunches of a blind man.

He found himself imagining—staring into the dust—the outlines of a shabby woodstove at the far end of the room, a gaunt, middle-aged woman in a gray dress bending down beside it, reaching toward a wood-box. In her right hand she had a wadded-up hankie. Had she been crying, perhaps? That was how the fire would have started, yes. A woman full of troubles, no longer alert, an unsafe old stove … He could know a good deal about the house, if he let himself. Long before the doomed brother and sister had lived there, there had to have been other generations, people who’d grown old in the house when it was only a one- or two-room saltbox. He thought about what kind of man would have built the place—cleared the trees, dug the foundation, notched the cornerbeams and nailed up the walls. Perhaps a young settler not even in his twenties, proud of himself, joyful in his freedom from dull New England parents, or parents back in Germany—a young man with a blond young wife as charged with animal vitality as he was, a big-smiled, big-bosomed, strong-legged young woman he fucked every night till the roof shook. He imagined it so vividly his genitals tingled; meanwhile the unhappy woman in gray—some long-forgotten cousin or aunt, perhaps, or some Wisconsin neighbor—stood at a dark, thick table, kneading bread. Her hands moved with an odd ferocity, as if driven by inner violence. He could smell the bread-dough, sweet and yeasty. The woman’s head was bowed, her black hair