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

The back of the car was piled high with boxes and paper bags which, after they’d carried them in and opened them, he found to be filled with Christmas decorations, napkins and tablecloth, a fruitcake from Texas, a large gilded menorah, which she set up in his window and filled with candles—what he thought of that he wasn’t quite sure: he was no bigot, at least not in relation to Jews, and he didn’t give a damn what his neighbors thought; but all the same, all the same … She’d brought a creche, which she was now setting up on the coffeetable, handling the figures gently, like a child at her dollhouse, sometimes leaning back to study her arrangement critically, like a painter at her easel; and comparing his feelings about the menorah to hers about the creche, a wave of self-revulsion rose in him. He leaned over beside her, resting one hand on his knee, and waved foolishly down at the glossy, brightly colored figures. “Nighty-bye, Jesus,” he said. She looked up at him, smiling, a sort o£ shadow moving over her features.

He nailed up the three Christmas wreaths she’d brought for the doors—the two large doors on the front porch, the smaller door in back—while she sorted out the Christmas tree lights and ornaments. “Where’s the tree?” she asked, looking around the room as if she thought it might be there but behind something.

“I’ll get the axe,” he said.

Her eyes widened with childish excitement. “We’re going to cut one?”

“Just like Joseph and Mary out behind the stable,” he said.

Again the shadow passed over her face, but whatever was bothering her she quickly put out of mind (he knew pretty well what was bothering her), and, taking his hand, she stood up. They got their coats on—it was now almost midnight—he got the axe from the shed, and they plowed through the crunchy salt-white snow to the starlit woods higher on the mountain, where there were evergreens of every size and shape, none of them quite right when one looked closely. In the end they chose one almost at random. He could cut off boughs where they grew too thickly and wire them in place where the growth was too sparse. “You’re good at that!” she cried as his axe bit in, slanting halfway through the trunk at one blow.

“As a child I was an axe murderer,” he said, and grinned at her.

She shook her head, smiling. He had a sense that suddenly she was standing hundreds of yards away, observing him as if from another century.

He swung three times more and the ten-foot tree toppled, falling slowly, softly, as Jessie called, hands beside her mouth, “Tim-burrr!” They put their hands around one another’s waists and stood for a long moment gazing at the fallen tree as if at some ancient mystery. Then, like two farm horses, they dragged it between them down the mountain.

As he built the stand for it, cutting, notching, nailing there in the livingroom beside the tree, Jessica fussing with candles, Mickelsson asked, “Jessie, how come there are stretch-marks on your stomach?”

He sensed her sudden stillness behind him. At last she said casually, “I had children. Two of them. Girls. I’ll show you their pictures sometime.”

“What happened?” he asked.

“They died,” she said. “Ages three and seven. It was one of those boating accidents. A long time ago.”

He waited for Jessica to say more, but no more came. He heard her move, behind him, to work on the candles at the further window.

“I’m sorry, Jessie,” he said.

After a moment she said, “Me too.”

He nailed the stand to the tree, clipped the excess boughs on one side and with picture-wire affixed them where they were needed. Then they moved chairs out of the way and, with a weight-lifter’s heave—branches and pine-needles scratching against his face—he raised the tree and placed it. They put on the lights, Jessica fussily giving him directions as he leaned into the tree from the step-ladder, Mickelsson swearing a little under his breath; then they put on the ornaments and tinsel. When everything was finished they turned off the room lights and sat side by side on the couch, gazing like children at the Christmas tree lights and their reflections in the windows.

Mickelsson said, when they’d been silent for what seemed a long time, “How long ago was the accident?”

“Six years,” she said. Gently, she squeezed the hand holding hers, telling him, he knew, to ask no more.

In his mind he formed the words, “I love you, Jessie,” but then held back, suddenly repelled by the beauty around him, repelled by time and his inadequacy, the deep cruelty of life this Christian mystery was supposed to have transmuted.

“I think it’s the prettiest tree I’ve ever seen,” she said.

They did not make love that night, though they lay side by side on the rug under the tree, hardly talking, eventually sleeping, waking up stiff and half frozen a little after sun-up.

Twenty minutes after Jessica left, Mickelsson, coming into the livingroom from the kitchen, found a visitor sitting under the tree: a cat. It was as large as any he’d ever seen, almost lynx size, made more lynx-like by its bobbed tail, medallion of some old war. The cat was almost all white, sooty white from end to end except for a gray cap around the partly missing right ear and another gray splotch on the rump. One eye was half closed by tissue like Scotch tape. It had an odd lump on its belly, and the turned-inward, absent-minded look of something dying.

“Hello, stranger,” Mickelsson said. His voice surprised him by its calm.

The cat sat on the rug between the tree and the woodstove, in the position of the Great Sphinx of Egypt except that the immense flat head was partly turned, watching him with yellow eyes. The cat’s neck was almost as wide as his shoulders. He was motionless except for the stump tail moving slowly from side to side.

Mickelsson put his hands in