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

caused an ant plague. No joke. I suppose if I minded anything about it it was that I, a mere kid … I couldn’t compete. He was a singer; voice like an angel. He was shy about his voice, but when he let it out, it was golden. I think I’ve never heard a better one, though I admit that may be blind love. Anyway, all his singing friends were there, and all his farm friends, and people from the stores in town—there was even this banker he used to go to for loans every spring. I used to be scared of him. …

“Anyway,” Mickelsson said, “it wasn’t my father—or my mother either—that made me feel odd. I had an uncle Edgar who went berserk during the war. He’d been peculiar all his life, in various ways—very secretive, also fussy, punctilious. Wouldn’t speak English: beneath his dignity. But when the war came, and people began to talk about the Swedes as collaborators—not too openly, but somehow you knew they were talking … Certain movies, maybe. Uncle Edgar joined up, to everyone’s surprise, and set off, mad as a hornet, to vindicate the race, or at any rate that was the family interpretation. He was a Seabee, one of the ‘old men,’ as they were called. They’d go in before everybody and build the landing strips. On some island in the Pacific something went wrong: he started machine-gunning his own people. My theory is it came to him that everyone was evil, the Americans as much as the Japanese—but I don’t know, of course. Projection, my psychiatrist claims. Maybe so. They sent him home, and he spent fifteen years in a V.A. mental ward. When they finally released him he was crazier than ever, but he was no longer violent—probably hadn’t been in years. After he was back, he almost never said a word to anyone, and if he did speak, it was almost never English. He visited us in California, a time or two. He’d sit up with Ellen half the night—I’d go to bed: every time he came he’d get me drunk—not on purpose; I couldn’t keep up. I’d hear them out in the kitchen, Uncle Edgar gibbering away in Swedish, Ellen saying, ‘Ya, ya, ya!’—she didn’t speak a word of Swedish, but maybe with Uncle Edgar she thought she did. He gestured a lot. I’d stare at the furniture, trying to keep it from swimming around, and I’d hear them going on and on, the crazy old Seabee taking nectar from her hand. … Of course that was long afterward. I meant to explain why I felt the way I did in highschool.”

“So explain,” she said and smiled. She squeezed his hand.

It was almost dark now. He thought of putting on another chunk of wood but did nothing.

“I guess the horror of it was, he got off, more or less. He knew what he’d done, killing those people. It has something to do with Nietzsche’s idea of pity—I’m sorry I keep prattling about Nietzsche.”

“You don’t,” she said. “Or if you do, I haven’t really noticed.”

He said, “Nietzsche thought the pitier becomes infected by his pity—becomes weak, like the person he’s sorry for. What he forgot to mention is that the pitied person becomes weaker than before, from his shame at degrading the one who pities him. It’s true.”

“Which is why you won’t take a loan,” she said, looking smug.

“Once the offer’s made it’s already too late.”

She shook her head and rolled her eyes toward God. “You see,” she said to God, “he’s hopeless.”

“And then there’s my grandfather,” he said.

She stifled a yawn, turning her eyes to him.

“For years and years he was a stern, boring Christian minister. I suppose I might not think him so boring if I knew him now. He was a good Luther man; had the whole hundred volumes in German. Anyway, in his seventieth year he got the gift. Did I tell you all this?”

“What gift?”

“According to the story, he was standing beside the marsh on my father’s place, watching my father and uncle fish, when suddenly, there in the water, exactly like a reflection, or so he claimed—or is said to have claimed—he saw my great-aunt Alma clutch her throat and suck for air and die. He said to my father, ‘Alma’s dead. Heart attack, looks like.’ My father and Uncle Edgar hardly knew what to say, they argued back and forth, but the old man made his claim with such conviction that eventually they pulled their lines and went home. Aunt Alma was dead, exactly as he’d said she’d be.

“After that he had these visions all the time. He knew trivial things—that a tire would go flat, or a dog would get mange—but also important things: he saw the hurricane Agnes weeks before it came. Various things like that. Believe me, we could’ve made money off him.”

Jessica extracted her hands from his and got up to put a log on. Sparks flew, making her jerk back. When the fire settled, she put the screen in again. She came back and sat once more beside him, not so close now, cautiously erect. “Did you ever see any of this?”

“Everybody did. It was common as ducks. It was so common the family didn’t even talk about it except if some stranger came, and then they’d get interested again.”

Now the wall was bright once more, flames leaping in the stove.

“Strange,” she said. They sat for several minutes without speaking, Mickelsson painfully conscious that all the talk was about himself. Then she leaned back onto his arm. “He just saw things, clear as day, and they were always true?”

“It was more complicated than that.” He hesitated, then gave in. “Sometimes he saw things clear as day; sometimes he saw things but not the things you wanted him to see. Once a cousin of ours called. Her father was very sick, down in Florida. She wanted my grandfather to tell her what to do, that is, whether