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

Eden—or perhaps the whiteness that brought on the memory: he saw the church where he’d gone every Sunday with his parents as a child—shiny white walls, skyblue ceiling, on the wall behind the pulpit a large, naive painting of Adam and Eve in the garden, their private parts not visible, and looped around the tree a rather friendly-looking snake.

What his reverend grandfather had had to say about Eden he couldn’t remember, probably nothing good, but it seemed to him now that his grandmother had told him a hundred times the story of those two naked people and the serpent. She told it with spirit, as she told all her stories, but no moral conviction; it had not been—in contrast to the story of God’s calling Samuel in his sleep, or Noah’s flood—a story full of meaning for her. She told it exactly as she told stories of her childhood in unimaginable Stockholm, or told the stories she made up to explain the pictures in his Charlie McCarthy coloring book. She told him, with ice-bright, merry eyes, how the snake had talked and Eve had bitten the apple and the pair had been thrown out of the garden, so that afterward human beings had to be farmers and storekeepers. So far as he could tell, the moral of the story was that because the snake had spoken to Eve, all snakes in the world ever since had to crawl on their bellies, perhaps so they’d be far from people’s ears.

Every Sunday, once he knew the story, Mickelsson—then five or six—would sit, hardly hearing his grandfather’s drone, gazing up, rapt, at the picture. It had never occurred to him that this was not the real snake, the picture not as true as a photograph, nor had it ever occurred to him, so far as he knew, that the story might not be a literal report of facts. He studied the expressions of the man, the woman, and the snake in wonderment—especially the snake: sad-eyed, misunderstood, suffering perhaps a premonition of the trouble to come but as yet knowing nothing, as innocent as the apple on the tree. He tried to imagine what the snake might be saying—that part was never quite clear in his grandmother’s account—but nothing would come to him, not even a guess. He could not help but think it had all been a peculiar misunderstanding, though nothing of much consequence, since it was obviously pleasant to be a farmer or storekeeper, though it was sad that people must now wear clothes. (One could not discuss with his grandmother the oddity of wearing clothes.) When he was eight, the church—which had originally not been Lutheran but something else, vaguely pagan—had held a fund drive and, to Mickelsson’s sorrow (also his father’s and uncle’s), the sanctuary had been changed, the wood stripped down and stained almost black, as it was supposed to be, according to someone, and an organ installed—a huge whale-mouth full of teeth—where the picture had been. He’d realized now that it was a bad thing to be thrown out of Eden, though it was nobody’s fault, so far as he could tell. After the reconstruction—or sanctification, as his grandfather had called it—his uncle had stopped going. It was interesting to him now that the son of a Lutheran minister should be able to rebel so whole-heartedly. But perhaps in the final analysis his father had been the greater rebel. He’d continued going, but, from all evidence, only for the hymns—he gloried in singing and grieved at his son’s inability—and for Sunday entertainment, and to visit his friends.

All the world had been thrown out of Eden at about that time, he knew now, by hindsight. World War II was on. Many of the older farmboys he knew, and even some grown men, his uncle among them for a brief period, had gone away to be part of it, and some were reported to be missing in action or dead. Sweden was said to be conspiring with the enemy. Collaborating. There had been movies to that effect. He would sit cringing, hot with guilt and shame, and at night, each time with astonishment, he would wet his bed. For years, even after he knew they were unjust, he’d been unable to get those movies out of his mind. At times—sometimes publicly, when he was drunk—he had blamed them for his choice of profession.

He and his family, cousins, and friends would sit hunched around the radio, dark and glassy-eyed, listening to Lowell Thomas or Gabriel Heatter report the news: bombings, planes missing, London on fire. No one had known that it was necessary to explain to him that Sweden was not at the heart of it. He’d explained, ragingly, on the asphalt school playground (he had often, in those days, argued with his fists), that his uncle had joined up with the United States Navy; but when Donald Warner—a face and name he would never forget—had said, “Sure! As a spy!” Mickelsson—that is, Mickelsson the child—had felt his heart sink.

Every time an airplane went over at night, he was sure that in a moment he’d hear the piercing, downward-slanting whistle of a bomb, and when the plane droned on, its dark sound innocently diminishing to silence, he was astounded by God’s mercy. It was otherwise with trains, moaning through the woods at the far end of the farm, carrying weary-faced young soldiers. Sometimes in town, standing on the platform of the gray brick depot—torn down thirty years ago now—he had looked in at them with something like that wonder with which he’d looked up at the picture of Eden in the church. They sat crowded like animals in a stockcar on its way to Chicago, but they smoked and grinned, sometimes waved through the gray, greasy window at him, peculiarly indifferent to the fact that when they got where they were going they would have to shoot people, or possibly die. Every Saturday afternoon he saw people die in movies—sometimes actual