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

“Can’t do it for a while yet,” Pearson said. “Maybe come October—”

“That’d be fine—”

“And I don’t guarantee.”

Mickelsson’s smile had become stiff. “That’s fine too. I understand, a thing like dowsing—”

“Cost you twenty-five dollars.”

Mickelsson stopped smiling. “I don’t know,” he began.

“Always charge the same thing, whatever I dowse for—water, gold, dead people. I don’t say it’s worth it, not by a darn sight. But I guess you’d pay more for a plumber, come to that. Any darn fool can lay pipe.” If he was joking, he didn’t show it.

Mickelsson tipped his head. “But a plumber guarantees his work,” he ventured.

“That’s what they’ll tell you,” Pearson said. He raised his left arm, ready to move Mickelsson aside as he would a bob-calf. “Wal, glad I run into you, Prafessor.”

As the old man started toward him, aiming for the register beyond, Mickelsson said, backing off a step, “All right, shall we say early October?”

“Sometime in October,” Pearson said. “See how things go.”

Mickelsson accepted it. Anyway, it didn’t matter; he’d have no money this fall for well-drilling. He walked with the old man toward the front of the store, where Owen Thomas was now putting the two large boxes, along with the wallpaper books and paint, on the carpet of the right-hand display window. Pearson set the stovepipe on the counter.

“Get any squirrels?” Mickelsson asked.

Pearson looked at him blankly, as if the subject had never been mentioned between them. Mickelsson squinted, then realized that the man was, of course, just deaf.

He drove home the back way, past the large brick Catholic church—most of the people of Susquehanna were Catholics, those who lived in town; legacy of the railroad days, Italians and Poles, a few Irish and Welsh—then up past the old brick hospital where the doctor had worked, a schoolhouse-like building shabby and morose in a clearing just beyond the shade of huge trees, its back walls perched at the edge of a cliff that dropped away sharply toward ash-pits. He passed large, sagging houses, then smaller houses, once the homes of men who’d worked the railroad beds, houses now mostly empty, caving in, stripped of their doors and windowframes. Where houses were still occupied there were snowmobiles in the yards, and torn-down motorcycles. Photographer’s heaven, he thought, and felt a pang of lonesomeness for his son. He remembered the photographs stacked, still wrapped in brown paper, in the livingroom of the house up on the mountain. They’d made his small apartment in town look like an art gallery, not any picture there more than two feet from another. Here he could spread them out, give them their due. They were splendid things, the whole set a gift from his son last Christmas: bicycles leaning against old shed walls, a plastic watering can among cinderblocks, dying trees, a spiderweb, portraits of friends, portrait after portrait of his sister. … As he turned onto the road leading to his house, Mickelsson found himself thinking suddenly, his stomach tightening, of his daughter. It was as if the photographs had made her more real to him than his memories could. The memories themselves became photographs. His mind fixed on one of Leslie at seven, struggling to read the Babar in French that Ellen and he, in their youthful folly, had bought for her. Ah, how determined they’d been to give their children culture, introduce them to languages early, while their minds were flexible! So now, though still a senior in highschool, his daughter was taking her second year of French literature at Brown, a lover of the snide, superior, hopelessly unlovable French.

“I don’t really mean I hate the French,” Mickelsson said aloud, tossing up his hand in a French-style gesture for the benefit of whatever ghostly visitors might be listening beside or behind him in the Jeep. Then, hearing himself speak aloud, he scowled and thought, How strange, this liberal intellectual timidity, this craven Judeo-Christian cowardice. Of course I hate the French! At once he thought of Jean-Pierre, the exchange student who’d lived with them in Providence, and felt repentant. (He thought, in the same movement of mind, of Luther’s dangerous doctrines—and Heidegger’s on “national character.” If his heart agreed, it ought not to.) Though it was true that Jean-Pierre was full of ignorant opinions about America—for example saw the zucchini in the overgrown, untended garden (they’d been away on vacation) and said smugly, in his execrable English, “Ah, ze Americains, zay will nevair undairstand wiz vegatables, not?”—it was also true that a gentler, more tender-hearted creature never sallied forth on earth. “Very well,” Mickelsson negotiated, opening his right hand as if to show those around him that he saw their point of view, “I like the French all right, some of them. But you’ll admit, they’re an exasperating people.” He cringed from a memory of Leslie, then fifteen, sitting on the couch in the livingroom with Jean-Pierre, kissing him with a passion Mickelsson would have thought beyond her years, no light in the room but the flickering glow of the fireplace. They had managed without a word to make Mickelsson feel that he himself was the guilty one, walking in on them in his slippers. “Perhaps I was,” he said aloud. The image stayed with him—his daughter’s startled, indignant face—until he consciously replaced it with another: his daughter in her nightgown, stretched out alone on her stomach in her bed, looking up from her poems of Victor Hugo toward where Mickelsson stood filling the doorframe, again in his slippers and robe. It was long after her bedtime, two in the morning.

“Hi,” she said.

“You’re supposed to be asleep,” he said, tiresomely parental.

She flopped over on her back. Her eyes, shiny in the light of the doorway, were like dark mist, or maybe the deep blue of mountains toward nightfall. “You know something about French?” she said. He made the mistake of waiting. Her silver-blond hair fanned out beside her—her body, under the flannel nightgown, alarmingly thin but developing toward womanhood. She said, “It