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

think about it. Even to get wood for the stove, he found, he couldn’t get out through the back door but had to go out the front door, which opened onto the porch, and lug through deep snow around the side of the house to the woodpile and carry back fire-logs the same way he’d gone out. When he’d carried in four armloads, his boots, his gloves, all the openings in his clothing, were filled with snow.

From the few live embers among the ashes in the bottom of the stove he got a fire going. As soon as it began to warm the room, the cat appeared. The cat stood in the doorway between the study and the livingroom, his large flat head low, tail back, as if stalking, carefully keeping his distance from the Christmas tree, then suddenly, without a sound, ran to the rug between the stove and the couch, looked around suspiciously, then settled himself. Instantly he looked as if he’d been sleeping there for hours.

“That’s the way,” Mickelsson said. “Make yourself at home.”

The cat pretended to sleep on.

Mickelsson washed dishes and straightened up the house. The icy snowfall and wind had let up now, only an occasional gust driving a puff of white down the mountainside. He really could make it into town without much trouble. A mile’s distance. An hour, an hour and a half at most. He thought of making lunch for Donnie. The Acme would be open, though few customers could be expected to come. He could make her something she’d never heard of, something wonderful but not unduly strange—bifteck au poivre, perhaps. He thought about how she would watch him, half admiring, half cross as he worked in her kitchen; but he continued straightening up the house, vacuuming, dusting, intending to set out but not yet doing it.

By noon the snowplow had still not opened up his road, which meant that there would be no mail today—no bills, nothing from the I.R.S., no angry letters from Ellen or her lawyers. He thought of the mail stuffed in the filing cabinet in his office at the school, another great burden of guilt he could dismiss, since there was nothing he could do: whatever lay there must lie on as it was until God and the county saw fit to clear the roads. Soon, it struck him, there would be a grim addition to the usual—the requests to send essays to stupid magazines, and so forth. Soon he would be getting appeals from the Ad Hoc Committee for the Defense of Jessica Stark, and just after each of them an even-handed letter of information from Blickstein, views from the mountaintop, gentle presentations of the larger picture, palatable ruin.

At three in the afternoon, the phone still had no dialtone. If he was wrong not to call his daughter and (not that he could reach him) his son, he could take no blame for his failure today, could not even smart at their failure to call him. Though the sun moved steadily from southeast to southwest, time was suspended; he need not even think of Donnie. God be with her, he thought, since nobody else was convenient. If God was off fishing in the northeast corner of the universe, or in bed with a cold, could Mickelsson be blamed?

“Maybe,” Mickelsson said aloud.

Toward dusk the wind began to blow much harder and the drifted snow rose in clouds that blotted out the sun—swirling, slate-gray, blasting the sides of treetrunks with sharp needles. As night approached, anxiety stirred in him. It would not do to put off for too long his conversation with Donnie. He tried the radio, looking for a weather report. The whole band hissed and crackled with static, and all he could find was Christmas music, disco, and NPR’s All Things Considered. He left the needle on the NPR station, then forgot to listen. Classical music came on without his noticing—an all-Wagner program, stirring, full of rattlings and weighty whumpings.

Now that darkness had fallen, the last of his pleasure in the snowstorm fell away. His agitation about Donnie Matthews’ pregnancy—above all, his vexation at her daring to lay the whole freight of it on him and at his own fatuous acceptance of the burden—began to confuse itself with worry about his son, until now always so restrained and level-headed. Perhaps he was still that, but sorely provoked. What if there should be some slip-up? (He got up, heavy-legged, carrying a book—he couldn’t remember having picked up the book or sitting down with it—and began to move through the house, pondering what he should move on next.) What could one do—actually do, within the limits of sane and humane liberalism—to block or expose the monsters, idiots and enforcers of the nuclear power industry? Could any politician, ever, anywhere, be shaken out of the dim-witted reasonableness and willingness to please that had gotten him his job in the first place—the turtlebrained patience or stupidity that enabled him to sit for months and years hearing sworn delaying and obfuscating testimony from the soft-spoken, nattily dressed nuclear devils—the new breed of extermination-camp scientists, the new breed of spectacle-rims-and-tooth-gold bankers, dutiful Eichmanns of the investment community—while every day new plants went up, and new patents for solar, wind, and wave fell before the threats, trickery, and cash of the hell people? He could feel his face reddening with anger as he thought about it. Partly Wagner’s fault, probably, his heavy brasses still poleaxing the night. Mickelsson’s hands clenched, squeezing the book, and his breathing grew labored. R. M. Hare had been wrong about the Nazis. The fol-de-rol of the Aryan aesthetic ideal—Wagner’s—had been a ruse in support of a much more ancient and familiar human goal: unlimited pig-greed. Hitler was alive and well at Seabrook, and the rules had not changed. Survival of the fattest. What made one furious, of course, was not that these people were unfit to live. It was that only by becoming spiritually and morally one