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

and Lord knows what. Phineas T. Barnum was in his twenties then, puttin together his exotic anamals and freaks and ballyhoo, not to mention things more serious, like the ‘Swedish Nightingale.’ Smith’s story got fancier as people stahrted perkin up their ears. Seems that even before he gaht tried and convicted at Bainbridge he’d had a vision one night when he was prayin for forgiveness for his sins. Seems the great angel Moroni appeared to him and told him that one day Joseph Smith would be famous all over the world. He was gonna be showed a bible written twelve centuries earlier on golden plates and buried right here in the vicinity. He’d take it from its hiding place and translate it by means of two miraculous ‘stones’ or spectacles, and so on, so on. By gol, people swallowed it hook, line, and sinker. It wasn’t only the times he lived in, come right down to it. There’s a picture of him—painting somebody did; I run acrost it in one of those books about him. Say what they like, he was a handsome man, if the painter didn’t lie. Handsome as one of them people in the movies. And you read the letters he wrote—there’s a lot of ’em reprinted in the book about his life—they’re as handily phrased as anybody’s letters, high-toned and elegant as Jefferson’s. They’re like the letters of Abraham Lincoln, but without the jokes.”

He fell silent, pursing his lips, staring at the ground. “I don’t mean to say he was better’n people think. He was everything that man Jones was, with the People’s Temple, except one thing. Back in behind all the craziness, Jones was sincere. Musta been. Sincere enough to die and take the whole temple with him. Joseph Smith was never that. He was a thief, con-man, libertine, murderer—organized a band of assassins called the Sons of Dan, killed any number of people, tried to kill the Governor of Missouri one time. You’d never catch Smith taking poison for his people!” He thought awhile; then; “The Mormons will tell you there never was any Sons of Dan, ’s all ‘gentile propaganda,’ or if there was there’s certainly no Sons of Dan these days, they’ll say. Don’t you believe ’em. There was a whole army of ’em, Angels of Death from Indianapolis to Salt Lake City. I don’t know about now.”

“Around here, you mean?” Mickelsson broke in.

“I gaht no evidence one way t’other, as to now.”

The night his house had been searched sprang to mind, and he told Pearson about that, watching the old man for any sign that he might know who had done it.

“Funny business,” Pearson said, squinting. “I s’pose it could be the Mormons, looking for something.” He seemed sorry now that he’d spoken of them.

“For what, though?” Mickelsson asked.

“Maybe they couldn’t told you theirselves.”

Mickelsson looked at the tracks he’d made, coming here, and Pearson’s tracks, intercepting his, and the tracks they’d made coming to lean on the fallen tree, then the tracks of the dog. There seemed nothing to conclude.

After they’d sat for a while in silence, Mickelsson asked, giving up on the other, “Seen any signs of life from your neighbor Sprague?”

“Every onct in a while there’s smoke comes owt the chimley, and now’n again the dogs bark. I guess they’re still in there.”

Absently, still thinking of other things, Mickelsson said, “It’s a wonder they make it through the winter.”

“Sooner or later they won’t, may happen. Gets all of us, in the end.”

Mickelsson studied the old man’s face carefully, with admiration. It might have been carved out of gray mountain stone. “You don’t think somebody should check on ’em now and then?”

“Not me. He’d blow my head off. You go check on him, you want to.”

Mickelsson smiled. “Strangest country I ever lived in,” he said.

“Still wild, that’s the thing of it,” the old man said. “Still half Indian. Over to Mont-rose now, that’s civilized. All them big white houses, big old Bible school, picture show downtown, three different restaurants to feed the rich people. Ain’t even gaht rattlesnakes, over there in Mont-rose. All stayed this side of the river, away from the hymn-singing. Myself now, I’d sooner take the snakes.”

“Yes, that’s it, that’s the feeling,” Mickelsson said thoughtfully. “Sort of pagan. I don’t mean bad.”

“All those Catholics—worst pagans the world ever saw—that’s Seskehenna. All their patron saints and their spirits for every gorge and crick.” Though he did not smile, he was enjoying himself. “You can bet there’s no ghosts over there in Mont-rose. They sail right up to the Throne like chickens in a whirlwind.”

Now both of them smiled.

Pearson raised his long left arm and pointed down at the band of river and dark, gleaming patches of pond in the valley. “People of a well-watered land,” he said, “that’s what the name means. The Seskehenna. Captain John Smith come and called them that, and the Indians didn’t want to offend him, so they took it as their name.” He lowered his arm.

They both sat looking for a minute or two, the sun through the falling snow blindingly bright where it hit an open slope, everything dark and shifting where the shadows were.

“Wal, good luck to you,” Pearson said at last, and glanced at Mickelsson’s boots as if they might not be adequate.

“Same to you,” Mickelsson said.

The old man touched the brim of his cap, then stood up and turned without a word and set off through the woods with gradually lengthening strides. The shadows, as he moved toward them, seemed to deepen. Mickelsson shaded his eyes and looked up in the direction of Spragues’ place, but he could see no sign of it. He would remember distinctly, the following morning, that he’d wondered that instant if it were possible that the house had burned down. It had not, at the time the thought occurred to him; but it had by the following morning.

As soon as he stepped out the back door to get wood for his stove, he saw