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

broken asphalt, and worn red brick of Main Street, beyond that a waist-high stone wall and then nothing, a sunlight-filled drop-off where thirty years ago one would have seen the grand vaults and arches of a turn-of-the-century depot, at one end of it a restaurant of glass and wood, said to be one of the finest in America. In the failing antique store a block up the street, there were yellowing pictures of the restaurant: grand Victorian gables and cupolas, tables so elegant they seemed to float, and beyond the far windows a spectacular view of the river. Studying the pictures in the dust-specked dimness of the antique store, Mickelsson had understood, in a kind of daydream, exactly what the town had been like in those days, how the huge old houses on the side of the mountain—now gray and warping, every shutter askew—had been mansions then; how the brick streets had rung with the tock of horses’ hooves and the whispered chatter of early cars. Susquehanna had been, he’d heard somewhere, a repair station for steam locomotives. Money had poured in, and pride of place. It must have seemed to the people of the town that it could never change, a settlement so glorious and well-to-do, so solidly established. Those who worked for the railroad, whether as linemen or as railroad engineers or as officials in sunlit offices filled with large, brass-studded leather chairs, had been heroes; it was the weak younger brothers who ran the post office, the barbershop, the hardware store. Now those heroes—except for the richest, who’d moved away—were employees of their once-humbler neighbors, the pharmacist, the man who sold household appliances, the people who ran the declining lumberyard, the real-estate office, the dry-goods store. “Vanity, vanity, all is vanity!” the preachers sang here as in other towns, or so Mickelsson imagined, recalling the great, spare church of his childhood. He imagined the people all nodding in solemn assent.

Mickelsson looked through wallpapers, borrowed four books to take home with him and think about, then bought white latex paint and two rollers, a dropcloth, and a plastic mixing pail. While the woman at the register rang them up, he caught sight of the tools on the wall along the left-hand side—saws, hammers, files, such a wealth of power-tools that for a moment, somewhat to Mickelsson’s surprise, farmboy greed leaped up in him. His father and uncle had spent all their lives building and unbuilding, converting barns from one use to another, horsebarn becoming chickenhouse, sheepfold becoming pig-shed—or constructing inventions of one sort or another, first drawing pictures far into the night at the round oak diningroom table: a heavy wooden frame with a track-slide loader for the buzz saw, a double-gated contraption for loading sheep, clunky wood-and-iron gadgets to fit on tractors or trucks or to lift his grandmother’s wheelchair onto the porch. It occurred to him only now that all that labor had been play, however solemn their faces, however they complained about time and the work still awaiting them. Lifting a sabre-saw, feeling the heft of it, Mickelsson recognized his hand as his father’s hand. They were the same size and shape and had much the same freckled redness; the only real difference was that his father’s hand had always been barked, scabbed, cracked, and calloused, always at least one fingernail discolored by some mishap. He remembered a chest his uncle and father had let him help them make when he was seven or so, a pine chest longer and deeper than a coffin, no nails or screws, just wooden pegs, locust. It had served as a windowseat through most of his childhood; later they’d used it to hold cow-feed. In the bright, pleasant-smelling hardware store, the discovery that his father and uncle, all those years, had been playing, enjoying themselves—making art, in a way—came over Mickelsson like an awakening. He felt an extravagant inclination to pity himself. What foolishness his life was, in comparison to theirs! But the likeness of his hand to his father’s hand distracted him, made him feel, almost unwillingly, a surge of joy.

When he looked up from his daydream he saw Owen Thomas and a customer, a man in a hunting jacket and a Wheel-Horse cap, sorting through a tray of small, brightly colored plastic objects, something to do with electricity, just a little way down the aisle. When Thomas smiled at him, politely nodding, Mickelsson held up the sabre-saw and said, “Fine collection of tools you got here!”

“Cost you an arm and a leg these days,” Thomas said, smiling privately, more shy than before. It was clear that he knew how Mickelsson felt. Maybe it was a similar feeling that had kept him in the hardware business, made him run it so well. For that matter, maybe it was that feeling for objects well-made, tools both beautiful in themselves and in their uses, that had inclined Owen Thomas’s daughter toward art school. Again he saw the present lining up with the past, like one image superimposed on another.

Thomas straightened up, holding out a handful of the plastic things to his customer, who looked them over through the bottoms of his bifocals, apparently counting them, his mouth fallen open, showing yellow stump teeth, then took the objects into his two cupped hands, nodding, still looking a little baffled, and carried them to the register. Thomas came over to Mickelsson. “How’s that place of yours coming?” he asked.

“Lot of work to be done,” Mickelsson said. He smiled.

“I guess there would be,” Thomas said. Though he pretended to speak ruefully, he obviously understood Mickelsson’s pleasure in the prospect of getting at it. “I guess the doc never had much time for fixing things. Mostly hired kids around town. You know how that is.”

Mickelsson chuckled, man to man, still pleasantly conscious of the smooth metal handle of the sabre-saw in his fist. He lifted one eyebrow and lowered his voice. “You wouldn’t believe that place,” he said. When Thomas glanced up at him,