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

The hunch Mickelsson had been hoping for hadn’t come. He got out his pipe and tobacco pouch and fingered tobacco into the bowl. “I dreamed all that,” he said. “Maybe that’s all it was, a dream.” Then, after a moment: “I had another dream, one time—a sort of a dream. I saw where they buried the boy.”

Pearson went on gazing into the air. “We could look sometime, come spring.”

“Maybe we should.”

“Mebby so.”

Mickelsson said, “You mentioned one time that you can dowse and find bodies.”

Pearson smiled and turned to look with fascination at Mickelsson’s pipe. “Wal,” he said, “I’ve been known to say a laht of things.”

“You can’t do it, then?” Mickelsson asked.

Pearson went on smiling but looked away. He seemed to hunt for where his dog had gone. After a while he said, “That house has seen a good deal, I guess. They say it belonged to Joseph Smith for a while, long time ago.”

“I didn’t know that!”

“Must not’ve looked over the title search when you bought it, then—unless the stories ain’t true. I ’magine they are, though. Anyway, most people think they are. He was a strange man, that Smith. Hahrd to say if he was crazy or the cleverest man of his time—or both.”

Mickelsson held a match to his pipe, not glancing at Pearson lest he put him off his story.

Pearson said, “Gaht a laht of it from his father, Joseph Sr., people say. There’s books about it—History of Susquehanna County, for one. Not very favorable to the Mormons. Joseph Sr. was a dowser and well-digger, but a laht of his time he spent hunting for buried treasure. Even to this day there’s supposed to be overgrown pits here and there that are supposed to be the remains of Joseph Sr.’s excavations.” When Mickelsson glanced at him, Pearson was smiling, wryly, enjoying himself. “The Prophet was something of a ne’er-do-well, just like his dad, at least that’s what people thought ’round here. There’s various descriptions of him in the books. I remember one I read one time—”

Mickelsson saw in his mind’s eye an image of Pearson he wouldn’t have guessed, the old man bent over a book at his kitchen table, or maybe in his Iivingroom, under a goose-necked floorlamp, thoughtfully reading, a country scholar passing a long winter’s night, his wife perhaps not far away, sewing, the old man’s finger moving under the words.

He was saying, “… torn and patched trousers held up by suspenders made of sheeting, calico shirt as dirty and black as new-plowed ground, uncombed hair sticking up through the holes in his old battered hat. But of course there was a good deal more to him. Maybe he wasn’t too educated, but he was a talker, clever as a crow. Sometimes when Smith would get worked up a kind of light come from his head, so people say. He was a first-rate crystal-ball gazer when he was no more’n a boy, and he got himself quite a reputation for finding lost objects and buried treasure. One time up in Bainbridge, New York, he hired himself out to some old fahrmer to find a lost Spanish silver mine, and by gol the thing was there, though not long afterward Smith was in court about it, admitting to fraud. He’d bless fields and make the crops come in strong, they say. One time he went owt to bless some fahrmer’s field, and he dropped his magic stone into his top-hat and went through his rigmarole, and that night there was a frost and the only field ruined was the one Joseph Jr. had blessed. The fahrmer was hopping mad and went to Smith to get his money back, and Smith made a big to-do abowt it—he made sure there was plenty of witnesses. Claimed he’d gotten mixed up and had cursed the field instead of blessing it—he was mighty sorry, a course—and he gave the poor man back his money. He was in and owt of court a hunnerd times, and everything he did seemed to make him more famous and respected, even though he was time after time fownd guilty.

“Wal, he was the right man born at the right time.” Pearson smiled to himself as if thinking what he might have been, given Smith’s opportunities. “I don’t remember the details, but it was a time of—what do they say—religious foment. The established churches was falling apart. The Baptists had just split into four different groups—Footwashers, Hardshell, Free Will, and something else—and around Palmyra, New York, where the Smiths lived, all kinds of new religions was shooting up. The Shakers was there, and the Campbellites, and some woman—I forget the name—called the ‘Universal Friend,’ claimed she was Jesus Christ Hisself come back … and there was a man named Isaac Bullard, claimed he was Elijah. … It was a good time for a man like Joseph Smith Jr. I don’t remember the whole story—Joseph Smith hisself would get confused about it, time to time. It had something to do with his mother, I b’lieve. Maybe he meant to play a joke on her, though he must’ve suspected from the stahrt that the thing had possibilities. He gaht together with a man named—I think it was—Rigdon that had stole some novel by an ex-Presbyterian minister, called The Manuscript Found, and Smith and Rigdon mixed it in tagether with some Masonic foolishness, after Smith gaht in with that—you have to admire the labor of it all. …”

Pearson broke off, ruefully shaking his head. “Wal,” he said, a kind of sigh, “the thing took off. You gotta remember what times those were, back there in the early-to-middle eighteen-hundreds; bunkum all over the place, and this pahrt of the country more than most places. That’s when that famous poet over in England was dickerin to get himself a lahrge piece of land along the Seskehenna River to make a paradise of some kind, maybe a nudist colony, with opera and theater and communal labor