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

When he put his hand over his eyes, admitting to himself that his mind was playing tricks, he thought of the photograph of Jessie as a girl of twenty-five, and the cave of his heart went darker.

2

There was still more than a week left of winter break—school was to start up again on January 30th. Mickelsson, holed up (the other Mickelsson, he kept insisting), often not remembering to eat all day long, seeing no one except on his rare trips to town—or seeing no one he could safely believe to be really there—became increasingly restless, increasingly full of dread and what he could describe to himself only as a kind of limitless petulance, a free-floating anger like that of a child who has been falsely accused, though nothing in the accusations Mickelsson could level against himself—“himself”—was false. He was haunted all the time now, which in theory should have convinced him that he was mad, but he could not be sure, turn it over as he might. Again and again he found himself listening, a prickling sensation coming over him, then turning to see if the ghosts were there. As often as not they were, just standing, incommunicative, all but unaware of his existence, the old woman full of anger—he continued to feel it building toward something—the old man increasingly confused, more and more senile, always looking for something or staring, puzzled, at his pocket watch. Their presence became routine—disturbing, even frightening, yet paradoxically—frustratingly—humdrum, perhaps because for all the emotion he felt flowing out of them, the old woman in particular, nothing came of it. He saw the fat man too, but never in the house, always in the yard with his arms stretched pitifully toward Mickelsson, fingers extended, blackness in his mouth and eyes. They seemed to exist—the fat man on one hand, the old people on the other—in separate unrealities, as if time had melted. At any rate the old people seemed as unaware of the fat man as they seemed, for the most part, of Mickelsson. Mickelsson worked out theories, not that they gave him any comfort: disparate functions of his mind, he theorized, had fallen together in a jumble, as if succumbing to entropy. The softening of the brain Nietzsche’s father had come to. Perhaps the old people were really there, or rather had been once, and he saw them because, like his grandfather, he’d developed second sight; and perhaps the fat man was a creature of Mickelsson’s guilty imagination, not there at all except in the living allegory of the soul. Once, in late afternoon, he saw the ghost of Michael Nugent. He was walking, with a look of grim determination, up the slope of the mountain behind Mickelsson’s house, moving toward the woods and perhaps the road beyond, toward Pearson’s place, or the Spragues’. The vision was so clear, so convincing in each detail, that Mickelsson went out into the freezing weather wearing only his usual indoor clothes, no boots on his feet, to see if the figure had left tracks in the snow. There were none, or rather, there were only fresh deer-tracks crossing diagonally the line where the boy’s tracks should have been. He blew on his cold hands and looked again, but he’d been right the first time; the boy had left no trace. There was nothing to see but an occasional swirling of snow over drift-caps, nothing to hear but the steady, loveless wind like the whisper of a seashell.

Sometimes for several hours the house would seem emptied of its ghosts, as if a curse had been lifted, and then, just as he began to breathe easy, there the old woman would be, looking out a window as if patiently waiting for the mailman—looking out one window, then out another, like a philosopher without a system. Sometimes, usually when he wasn’t in the room, the old people would talk, for the most part too quietly for him to hear what they were saying. They said nothing important, nothing that took more than a few words. Increasingly their presence was a cause of foreboding but not fear or alarm: dread that became a steady deadweight on him, or a gnawing, like hunger. He doubted that he could have explained it even to Jessie, not that he tried; but something about them made his muscles and bones heavy, his mind’s movement slow. He thought sometimes of what old Sprague had said, up in his house above Mickelsson’s, how Caleb and Theodosia had come to want nothing to do with relatives, how eventually “it” had gotten them, the something that inhabited the woods.

He resisted driving into Binghamton to see friends, resisted even thinking of friends and their need of him, Jessie especially. He depended more and more on his woodworking projects to keep him sane, if sane he was, mostly making picture frames, one after another, each more elaborate and ornate than the last, for his son’s photographs, using scrap-wood—apple, pear, butternut and maple—from the Susquehanna Home Center, where when no one was around he sorted it from the piled-up kindling-stack beside the saws. He routed and bevelled, sanded, stained, resanded, sometimes gilded, then boxed them by the dozen and shipped them, with carefully lettered labels and exactly the right postage, to his son’s old address at U.V.M. Once when he was smoking his pipe and reading, his eye chanced to fall on the box of keys he’d found when he was fixing up the diningroom, and it occurred to him that perhaps he might clean them up, or anyway clean up a few of the more impressive, and somehow make use of them in his projects. They were for the most part large blunt things of brass or iron, quite beautiful once they were shined up. He discovered that one could make locks for them out of wood and the metal from coffee-can lids—quite