Nickel Mountain

by John Gardner

  Uncle John nosed the car up the drive and right to the steps. There were dozens of people there, mostly friends and relations who bowed and waved when they saw her, a few conspicuously strange to her, queerly stiff and peculiar, friends or relatives of Henry’s. Uncle John said, “Here we are, Callie.” He smiled, and the smile summoned memories, so many in an instant that she couldn’t single one out, no more than she could have separated the rays of the sun: as if all her past happiness were poured together into one silver cup and the cup was overflowing. She said, “Uncle John,” all the meaning of her life flowing into a name, and he reached for her hand, formally. “Gras fyddo gyd â chiwi” he said. Grace be with you. Mary Lou and Susan Cooper came running to the car, Dorothy Carrico a little behind them, shining like all summer in their bridesmaids’ dresses, and Mary Lou reached through the window to hug her. She said, “Quick, quick!” then backed away while someone—one of the Griffith boys (how tall he’d grown!)—opened the car door and helped her out.

  Inside, downstairs in the third grade Sunday school room, fiery with memories and sunlight from the casement windows, she stood patiently while they fussed with the dress and admired the bouquet, every few minutes shushing Tommy and Linda, who were to carry the cushions with the rings. She answered them all when they spoke to her, politely admired their dresses, but she felt as though she were not there. She felt weightless, mysteriously separate from the cream-colored walls and the dark oak doors, the windows with sunlight streaming in, the faded wine-colored plush chairs in front, the wooden folding chairs all around, the pictures of Jesus and Lazarus, Jesus and the children, Jesus praying. Beams creaked over her head and she could hear feet shuffling, voices talking, a rush of indistinguishable sounds, the music of the organ playing hymns, a steady murmur of sound that seemed to come from all directions like the sound of a waterfall heard from up close, but not loud, gentle, almost comforting, saying. … The feeling of weightlessness grew on her. She gave her mother her cheek to kiss and heard her whisper strange syllables, saw her wiping her eyes (all far away, far, far away, the kiss, the whispered words); she saw Linda and Tommy being led to the stairs, Mary Lou and Susan and Dorothy Carrico tripping away, blowing kisses to her; she felt Cousin-Aunt Tisiphone taking her hand. The hum around her began to die out. Then silence, complete and terrible as a silence in a busy dream. She heard the organ, suddenly loud as thunder in her ears, and her mind sang wildly, hurled back to childhood:

  Here comes the bride,

  All fat and wide!

  And then she was standing at the rear of the church, her father beside her, taking her arm, and Dorothy Carrico was walking toward the candles and flowers and the blazing music and the bright reds and blues of the round church window; and now, without feeling, as weightless as the cloud passing over the mountain (out the window to her right, beyond the maples), she, Callie, was walking slowly, her father hopping twice on one foot to get in step. She thought, oblivious to the roar of the organ:

  Soames is her second name,

  Second name, second name. …

  Henry Soames was watching her, dignified and comically beautiful, as all her own family was beautiful, and she walked slowly, having all eternity to taste the strange new sensation of freedom, knowing that she too was beautiful now, yes, more beautiful than the wedding gown, lighter, purer, immutable as the gown was not, as even the ceremony was not. Their faces surrounded her, looking up, shining as if reflecting the secret radiance thinly veiled, her total and untouchable, virginal freedom. In a moment, she would feel her weight again, her mere humanness, the child inside, but not yet. The church window said, All will be well. The white of the cloth on the pulpit said, Go slow. She watched Henry, more solemn and splendid even than her Uncle Earle when he won the election for Mayor, more beautiful than Duncan, looking up, tossing a child in his arms, or Bill with his hand poised over the chessboard, or Aunt Anna paring apples with speckled, swift fingers. Then suddenly the room was real again, full of organ music, the lead mullions of the stained glass window as solid as earth, the rich colors deep and heavy as stone, even the professional simper of the Preacher solidly real, as heavy and solid as iron chains and as heavy as the golden burning bodies and faces of the people around her—the people she knew and those she didn’t. Only she herself was weightless, and in a moment she too would be real again. Go slow, said the room. Be patient, said the trees. She could feel weight coming, a murderous solidity, hunting her.

  III

  THE EDGE OF THE WOODS

  1

  At 5:00 A.M. when his wife woke him up Henry Soames opened his eyes at once, and he kept them open, unblinking, as he moved to the telephone table in the living room. He let himself down into the overstuffed chair, his long, thick upper lip lifted slightly from his teeth, and picked up the receiver. The wire hummed. Old Prince appeared in the bedroom doorway, ears raised, head cocked, seeing what he was doing. Then he turned and went back to his place on the floor beside the bed, next to Callie.

  It was neither dark nor light in the room. The bloom of snow outside dimly lighted the wallpaper, bringing out silver glints and blue-gray lines—a man and a woman in old-fashioned dress standing on a path under a willow tree near a bridge, their two children, a boy and a girl, running up the path toward a man and a woman in old-fashioned dress, a willow tree, a bridge, two children, a man and a woman. Snowlight sharpened the angles and curves of the furniture so that each piece stood distinct and detached. In the entry room where there were no windows the wallpaper design blurred to shadows and then darkness. He sat looking straight into it, but he felt the entry room more than saw it. There was the old roller piano they never used except for putting photographs on—it had belonged to his mother once—and the oval rug, the nicked old shelf table with hymn-books and magazines underneath and a limp runner over the top, and on the runner, waiting to be hung up again, the wall lamp. In the entry room things seemed settled in, permanent, but not here. The furniture here was like furniture that had just been moved into a new house or is just about to be moved out of a house where nobody lives. In the half-light, the carved oval frame high on the wall above the davenport—it was an old picture of Henry Soames’ father holding a book—seemed to have nothing in it.

  “Number, please,” the operator said. He gave the number and waited again while she rang it.

  Over the phone the doctor sounded half-asleep. He said, “Well, sometimes it’s two or three hours after the sac breaks before contractions begin. When they do, you run her in to the hospital and have them phone me.”

  “Yes, sir,” Henry said. He started to say more, but the doctor said goodbye and hung up. Henry sat in the darkness pulling at his left hand with his right. The skin was loose. He’d been getting his weight down lately.

  It had snowed some more during the night, and the snow was sharp blue under the neon sign up front. This was the new part of the house, and he thought again how it was good they’d put the house where they had after all, with the Stop-Off right handy. It was Callie that had decided it, not Henry. He’d have thought she’d want something nicer, more like a home, a place with a lawn and trees and a view of the mountains. So had her folks. (“Now wouldn’t you rather have the old Kelsey place, or maybe a new house up on the hill next to our place?” her father had asked, and she’d said “No.” Henry had said, “The Kelsey place’d be real pretty with a coat of paint and some fixing up, and—” but she hadn’t let him finish. “Henry, be practical,” she’d said. She’d snapped it out. George Loomis and Lou and Jim Millet and Nick Blue the Indian and neighbors from here to Athensville and New Carthage had pitched in and helped him lay up the cinder-block house behind the diner and right next to the lean-to room where he, Henry, had lived all those years by himself—and they’d done it all by fall, had just finished up in time for them to pull down the scaffolding and sweep up the yard and go take over the work at George Loomis’s place when George had his arm torn off in his corn binder. Callie’d been six months pregnan
t by then, but she still ran the diner alone while he painted outside and inside, wheezing, oozing sweat, knocking together windowboxes and planting zinnias and laying yellow-painted rocks out along the driveway. When it was done they’d stood at this same window looking out at the neon sign where it jutted out from the corner of the diner, watching the semis roll by on the dark highway past the diner—and now house—and Callie had said, “It’s real nice.” She had stood with her elbows close to her sides and hadn’t looked at him, or not until he’d put one finger under her chin and turned her face around. She’d looked past him even then.) The snow lay smooth, sharp blue right out to the highway. Beyond the highway more snow, luminous white in the darkness, stretched away to the trees. The edge of the woods was vague, ghostly this early in the morning. The woods were over a mile deep—they came out over by Freund’s place—and though they never had in the old days, they made Henry uneasy now. It was as if there was somebody in there moving around. He dreamed about him sometimes, and sometimes when he was wide awake he wondered how it would be if Willard came back. They never talked about him.

  He looked at the crack of yellow light under the bedroom door.

  Jim Millet had said three days ago when he’d pulled in for gas, “You be sure and call the doctor yourself. There’s a night nurse down there gets a real charge out of delivering babies herself.” Dr. Costard, the obstetrician, had told Callie almost the same thing. He’d patted her arm with his white, soft hand and said, “When the time comes, be sure to call me, Mrs. Soames. Don’t leave it to the hospital. They get rushed sometimes, and you know how it is.” But that had been in mid-afternoon, when Dr. Costard was wide awake.

  The chores lights were on up in Frank Wells’ barns on the hill, but no lights in the house. They’d driven to Cobleskill for a family reunion. It was too bad, for Callie’s sake. But then, they’d never been close. Frank Wells drank most of the time, these days, and though he was never much trouble himself—sometimes on his way home from town he’d pull off the road and down into the creek to sleep it off—it made things troublesome, in the end, because Callie’s mother was religious. She played the organ at the New Carthage Salem Baptist Church. That was partly why Callie’d come to work at the Stop-Off in the first place, she said. To get away.

  He squeezed his upper lip between his finger and thumb and blinked slowly. He got up, shoved his hands down into his limp bathrobe pockets, and moved to the bedroom door.

  “Looks like you’re gonna have that watermelon after all,” he said.

  Callie smiled back. Neither of them ever called it a baby.

  It looked as if she had pillows inside her nightgown. Her legs and arms and neck were thin, gray, and her head, turned toward the yellow plastic bedlamp, was flushed and too large.

  “If it didn’t come soon I was going to call it off,” she said.

  Henry went to her, smiling, sliding his slippers on the hardwood. He stood for a moment with his hands in his pockets, then touched her shoulder with the tips of his fingers. She didn’t move her hand to his.

  Under the light her hair looked dry. He stood for a long time looking at her and smiling, thinking, Well I’ll be damned, it’s really come time. And in his mind he saw Willard Freund leaning over the diner counter, sharp-elbowed, tiny-eyed, smiling and talking to Callie. In his mind he could see it as if it were yesterday, Willard’s wide mouth, his cocked eyebrow, his face lighted under the lamp, the cluttered room behind him dark. Sometimes the three of them had talked. And then he’d found out what Willard was doing, had done already by that time because by that time he was gone, had run out on her as a man would run out on some common country whore. And now he would catch himself watching the woods, though it wouldn’t be from the woods he’d come; he’d come by the highway if he came. He’d come in with his hands in his pockets and his collar turned up, his eyes shy, and maybe Henry would feel sorry for him because he’d been a damn fool, and then again maybe he’d kill him, he didn’t know. Sometimes before he knew what it was he was thinking he would look at his wide, short hands and would close them slowly.

  She said, “Let’s go to bed, Henry. It may be hours yet.” She looked past him; she hadn’t even turned her head.

  He nodded. It was the truth that he needed his sleep. He wasn’t a kid any more. Twenty-five years older than she was, old enough to be her father. A fat old man with a weak heart, as Doc Cathey, their regular doctor, had said. “You get your beauty sleep, boy. You keep on settin’ up half the night and one of these days Callie’ll be a widow.” Doc had chuckled, hunched up and watching him sideways as if the idea of it pleased him all to hell, and maybe it did.

  (Out by the gas pumps Doc had sat in his dented-up car fidgeting with his plastic hearing aid, his head brown and wrinkled as an old baldwin, and then he’d grinned, embarrassed maybe, and he’d said, “I s’pose you don’t want to talk about it, eh? … about Willard?”

  Henry had half-turned as if he’d heard a footstep crunch the gravel behind him, but there was only the long, flat diner, the new white-painted house, and, beyond the roof, mountains and white clouds, and birds flying, starlings. He turned back to the car and put his hand on the cold metal of the gas pump, and Doc leaned farther out the car window, his eyes squinted almost shut behind the thick glasses. “You know I ain’t one to noise things around. Don’t bring on no coronary for nothin’. I never said she ain’t happy with you and this place here, I never inferred it.” He looked down at Henry’s hands.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Henry said. His voice was quiet, so quiet it surprised him. It was like a woman’s voice. The old man looked at him, and Henry could hear the noise of the starlings half-a-mile up the mountain.

  The corners of Doc’s mouth twitched back. “Now, you listen here. Somebody was gonna bring it up sooner or later, whether it’s the truth or not, and there’s people could be a lot meaner about it than me. You get use to hearing it, boy, get use to it. It’s for your own good; you take my advice.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Henry said again, a whisper this time. He leaned toward the car and touched the door handle. He felt sweat prickling. The dog appeared beside the diner, ears lifted, watching.

  Doc Cathey counted out his money with his thumb clamped down so hard on the bills that they almost tore as he pulled each dollar free. Henry took the money and didn’t count it. The old man switched on the ignition and ground on the starter button. A muscle in his jaw jumped. “I’m just trying to help out,” he said. “You know that. Don’t be a damn mule.” Henry didn’t say a word, and after a minute the old man rammed the car into gear and out onto the highway, spattering gravel. The dust he stirred up hung in the air, mixing with the smells of gasoline and exhaust fumes; then, very slowly, it settled.

  Henry went in, moving automatically, looking up the highway toward the hill. In the sticky heat of the diner he rang up the price of the old man’s gas, not looking at the register, bent over it but not looking at it, and then, knowing what he was going to do and knowing he would have to fix it, he closed his two hands around the age-dry sides of the cash drawer and bent the wood outward until it split and broke away. Change fell out and hit the floor and rolled, ringing. His chest burned white hot. After a minute Callie came up and stood behind him, not speaking at first. He pulled at his lip. She said, “Have you gone crazy or something?” She waited. “Henry, go take a nap or something. You act like you’ve gone crazy.” She spoke slowly and evenly, keeping back from him.

  “Callie,” he said. His voice cracked. He thought for a split-second of his father’s voice.

  They looked at each other, and then she looked out at the pumps, or past them. Her lips were puffy from the dryness of August. “I can manage out here. Go on.” She didn’t come any nearer. That afternoon Henry went hunting. He shot three crows, and it took him till after dark.)

  He pulled out of his bathrobe and slippers and crawled into bed and snapped off the bedlamp. He lay there awake,
or lay there believing he was awake, breathing shallowly. Two hours later, at seven, the labor pains started, and Callie said, “Henry!” She shook him, and when he opened his eyes he saw that she had been up for some time. She was dressed up as if for church, even wearing her hat.

  It was the twenty-ninth of December and the road to Slater was ice-packed and banked by gray drifts. The sky over the mountains was as gray as the snow, and there wasn’t so much as a sparrow moving on a telephone wire, and not a trace of wind. Black telephone poles stood out sharply against the gray all around them, pole after pole, a series winding downward as if forever. He was conscious of them as he passed them; even when he thought about other things, his body registered the rhythm of the telephone poles going by.

  Callie looked at her watch once or twice on the way, timing the pains. She sat too close to the rattling door.

  “Holding up all right?” he said.

  “ ’Course I am, Henry. You?”

  His right hand let go of the steering wheel as he shrugged. “I’m fine. Jim dandy.” He laughed. It was so cold in the car that their breath made steam. He pulled at the toggled wire heater control and the heater fan clanked into motion.