Mickelsson's Ghosts (54 page)

“Could we stop off at my office for just a minute?” she asked. She was breathing hard. “I didn't have time to put a sign up to cancel my appointments.”

“No problem,” he said. He felt two things at once, emotions distinct and simultaneous as two colors on a flag: a flash of annoyance at the age-old inconvenience of womanhood, and a flash of joy at her having left in such a hurry to catch up with him.

Later, driving down Highway 81, he asked, “By the way, why were you mad at me last night?”

“Was I?” she asked.

He gave her a look.

She half smiled, then frowned, gazing through the windshield again, and after a moment lowered her eyes to the large, graceful hands in her lap. “You should have invited me to your party before the others,” she said. “That would've been common courtesy.” She looked at him, her shoulders hunched inward, her face a living history of the Diaspora—morose, legalistic, gentle. The thought of Donnie Matthews came into his mind, then the memory of all those nights he'd sat up, pretending to work, checking the clock now and then against his will, wondering where the hell his wife was and glad he didn't know.

The sky darkened increasingly as they wound up into the mountains. Here and there they passed parked cars or pickup trucks, probably deer-hunters, he realized when he saw two men standing in a field with guns. On the backs of their Day-Glo orange jackets they had hunting tags. As he passed his house Mickelsson pointed, telling Jessica, “That's it! That's where I live!” She looked out, then rolled down her window to look back at it after they'd passed. “It's big!” she said. “I had no idea it was so big! It seems odd, though—a man all by himself … a house like that …”

“I have grandiose taste,” he said. “Who knows, maybe I'll meet some little angel, have sixteen kids.”

“You should. You'd be a wonderful father,” she said. She shook her head. “I don't know. A house like that, I'd go bonkers.”

An awkwardness settled between them, or at least on Mickelsson. It was as if Donnie Matthews were right behind them, in the back seat. He drove her from his mind. Jessica was distant again, as if sorry she'd mentioned children, or her fear of big houses. Mickelsson sighed and shook his head. He doubted that his daughter and son would agree about his gifts as a father, ignored and abandoned as they must feel. And angry, perhaps. Certainly it was anger in his son's case; otherwise he'd have called.

He glanced into the woods at the side of the road as if expecting something. There was nothing, of course. Treetrunks, a tangle of bare branches, a few gray leaves. The light had a dead look. They passed a tar-paper shack with the windows broken out, the driveway grown up in weeds. The climb was steep now. He shifted down.

“It's funny,” she said, “how much land there is in this country … that nobody lives on.”

“It's desolate, all right,” he said. He glanced at her. “It bothers you?”

She thought it over. “Of course.” She stole a glance at him.

He slowed, passing John Pearson's place. Though he'd still had his dairy just a year ago, one would have thought the barns had stood abandoned much longer, the old gray silo tipping precariously away from the cowbarn, the doors hanging partly off the track like half-knocked-out teeth. The house was asbestos-shingled and dark, patched layer on layer, surrounded by rusting bits of machinery, an old wringer washing-machine, small outbuildings. The front yard was fenced, and in one corner four sheep with black faces stood watching the Jeep pass. Where they went for shelter he could not guess, unless the open, rusted cellar door gave the answer. It was a queer idea, obscurely depressing, the thought of sheep muffling around in an old man's cellar. Behind the house, neatly stacked across the space of half an acre, stood cord on cord of wood.

On the next mailbox he read, in black paint,
Dudak.
He said, “Spragues' should be the next place up.”

She nodded. She sat turned partly sideways, her right arm reaching as if casually toward the dashboard, the hand resting there with fingers spread wide. Whether she was afraid he would drive into a ditch or afraid of something else was not clear, but he wouldn't be surprised if it were the country itself that troubled her. Now the mountain was wooded on both sides of them, and there was snow on the ground, glittering ice on the branches overhead. The road switchbacked sharply to the left, over a stone bridge spanning a deeply gouged creek, a fall that made the heart gasp, then climbed more steeply for a minute or two, then levelled off. He saw a mailbox in the distance, cocked back from the road like a pistol hammer, and as they drew nearer he made out an opening between trees, a two-rut lane that, except for the mailbox, he probably wouldn't have noticed. There were car tracks. He stopped the Jeep at the entrance to the lane and sat for a moment looking in.

“Peter,” Jessica said, then didn't finish.

He could see no house, at first; then, as if by magic, out of the fallow gray of trees and brush the drab gray rectangle of the house emerged, the windows unlighted, no smoke coming out of the chimney. Not far from the house, leaning heavily to one side, sat a fat, gray car, perhaps a Pontiac or Oldsmobile, a relic of, at the latest, the 1960s. It was certainly not that car that had left the tracks. On the left side it had no tires. Now he began to make out smaller buildings, all as gray as the house—something that might be a garage or chickencoop, something that might contain pigs or a shaggy old pony. In high weeds at the side of the house there were butane tanks. Mickelsson leaned forward, looking up through the windshield, searching all around, and confirmed the suspicion that had come over him: no phone line, no electricity.

“Are you sure there's someone living here?” Jessica asked.

“I guess we'll find out,” he said. He shifted into low and four-wheel drive, and the Jeep nosed slowly in.

They saw when they came up beside it that the house was, like his own much grander house, a T-frame: behind the two-story front part, curtain-less, paintless, plain as a box, a porched back part ran out, reaching deeper into the woods. The whole house was up on blocks—trash lay underneath, and more trash in great, rotting mounds toward the rear—and the rear extension was crooked, bulged outward, the back wall fallen among corncobs like a square nose sniffing.

“All out,” Mickelsson said, and opened his door. Jessica nodded, compressed her lips, and opened the door on her side. Dogs began to bark, noisy and frightening as a volley of shots, but when Mickelsson looked around for the source of the racket he saw at once that the dogs, leaping up at the chicken-wire wall of a lean-to shack, could not get at them. Something lay at their feet. He looked away.

“It's all right,” he said, meeting Jessica at the front of the Jeep and taking her elbow.

She nodded, watching the ground, stepping carefully, the dogs barking more and more wildly, snapping at the air, as the two of them moved toward the porch. Mickelsson kept his eye on the paintless door as they approached it, but in his mind he continued to see those leaping, rolling-eyed, half-starved hounds, and on the dirt floor by the dogs' feet … whatever it was … a head of some kind, a horse or cow, perhaps; he didn't much care to know which.

“This is a crappy idea,” Jessica said softly as he brought up his fist to knock.

He did not allow himself to think about it, but brought his knuckles down hard, three times, against the wood.

The man who opened the door was shrivelled and bent forward like a monkey, maybe five feet tall, not a quarter-inch anywhere on his large, lead-gray face unwrinkled. He might be fifty, or he might be a hundred. He had a wrinkled, spit-stained cigarette in his hand, pinched between two arthritically swollen fingers, and smoke came out of his nose and mouth as if his meagre, dried-out insides contained smouldering rags. He wore a thick, filthy sweater full of holes and snags, and over it a tattered denim frock, white-seamed with age. His gray hair was stiff and went out in all directions, and though he'd recently shaved, every crack on his chin and lower cheeks was full of bristles, feathery and silver as frost. He looked out through the screen with an expression of sharp curiosity, perhaps alarm, and even when Mickelsson said “Hello!”—smiling, his voice as hearty as a farmer's—the man said nothing. “My name's Mickelsson. I live down the road a ways, down by Susquehanna,” Mickelsson said.

Perhaps the man nodded; it was hard to be sure. Then he turned to look up at Jessica with the same animal curiosity he'd shown as he sized up Mickelsson. At last he smiled, showing naked gums and one last yellow tooth. “I know who ya are,” he said—a high, thin whine, merry grin like a boy's. “Come on in!” He pushed at the door and, when it stuck, kicked it hard with his boot. As the screen swung out he stepped back, making room for them to pass. Jessica stepped in as if completely at home, then stopped, two steps into the room, to wait for Mickelsson. The old man slammed the screen door, then the wooden door, and came in behind them. “I see you down there at the doc's,” he said. “Yore place is right down under my place.” His head came forward, tongue lolling, as if he meant to make an obscene suggestion. “Sometimes I hear you, workin away in the middle of the night.”

“I do that sometimes,” Mickelsson said. He spoke loudly, on the presumption that the old man was deaf.

Jessica stood looking around, smiling vaguely, at the dark, filthy kitchen—dishes in the sink, the dirt on them caked as if it had lain there for months; grocery bags full of garbage along the walls; patches of linoleum torn away or worn through; on the sagging ceiling and upper walls, immense dark stains. In the center of the kitchen stood a long pine table filled to the last inch with boxes of cereal, mason jars, an open milk-carton, dishes, silverware, balls of string, jumbled piles of sewing, bits of mail. Everything in the kitchen was the same color, the bone gray of long-fallen timber.

“Gwan along into the parlor,” the old man piped, waving in the direction of the doorway beyond them. “It ain't as bad in there. If you need—” He broke off to cough, doubling over, covering his mouth with the hand that held the cigarette.

Carefully, they picked their way toward the parlor. The room, when they reached it, proved as messy as the kitchen and cold as a barn, but at least it was lighter here, sunlight pouring in through the curtainless windows. The old man, still coughing, took a stack of magazines and old clothes from the sofa between the two windows, making just room enough for the two of them, then, when they were seated, took a waffle-iron from the plywood-patched seat of a wooden chair opposite and sat down himself, facing them, four feet away. Again he showed his gums and his single up-stabbing tooth in a smile. “Make you a cup of Offaltine?” he asked.

“No thank you,” Mickelsson said.

“I had coffee just before we left,” Jessica said. Her eyes moved from corner to corner of the room, half fear, half sharp disapproval.

“Good,” the old man said, and laughed, poking his tongue out. “I doubt we could find it ennaway!” Then he leaned back in his chair and just looked at them, smiling sociably, tongue lolling again, waiting. At the far end of the room a door opened—the old man did not turn to look, merely watched his guests in amusement—and an old woman with a haggard face and snow-white hair poked her head in, then drew it back again quickly and closed the door. “That's Mother,” the old man said, and gave a laugh. “She don't like company. It ain't that she don't like 'em, really. She had a stroke, while back. She thinks she don't look good.”

“Poor thing!” Jessica said. The fear and disapproval sank away as if by magic, replaced by a troubled look.

“Wal, we all got our crosses,” the old man said. Then: “So you went and bought the doc's place.” He drew the cigarette to his mouth and pulled at it, sucking the smoke in deep.

“Yes, me and the bank,” Mickelsson said, mechanically smiling. He sat unnaturally erect, partly to give Jessica room, partly for fear that the sofa might give way if he put his full weight on it. “I understand you used to have relatives living there.”

“That's right,” the old man said. He was quiet a moment, smiling and nodding, letting smoke drift out. He studied Jessica, considering whether or not to say more, and at last said, “Great-uncle and -aunt of mine. Uncle Caleb and Aunt Theodosia. Some people say they're still down there.” He coughed.

“As ghosts, you mean?” Jessica asked, turning away from him, looking toward the door where the old woman hid.

“That's it, ma'am.” He laughed, then looked mock-stern. “They was never close with the rest of us. That's why it got 'em. There's Spragues all through these here mountains from one end to th'other, but they didn't want no part of that. They had no use for kin.”

“It?” Jessica asked, turning back to him, frowning a little, leaning forward.

The old man looked blank.

“You said, ‘That's why
it
got 'em.'“

Sprague stretched his lips out, lifted his hand a few inches, then dropped it to his knee again. “Didn't mean nothing by it,” he said. “Sometimes people just get taken over, ya might say. By their moods or suthin. Some kinda feelin that's in the woods.” He looked to Mickelsson as if for help. “You know, there's us and there's all that other. If people stick together, take care of their own—”

Mickelsson nodded. “It's not always easy, though. You, for instance, way out here in the wilderness …” He just missed saying “sticks.”

The old man nodded, smiling again, then came to. “Oh, we see people,” he said, abruptly defensive. “I got a brother Bill over there in Gibson, and a sister in Hallstead. They come by here now'n again, with the kids and all. We see people, all right. Not like we used to, now that Mother ain't so well and the car don't keep runnin. But Bill's a mechanic, my brother. Soon's he gets over here, he's gonna take that old automobile apart and get it runnin just like new.”