Nickel Mountain

by John Gardner

  The ground was mucky, this side of the house. It squeezed between his fingers when he leaned on his hand, and it clogged the brace on his ankle, making his foot as heavy as it would be in a cast. His sweater was damp and redolent of wood from the dew he’d come through, and his pantlegs were as soaked as if he’d fallen in the pasture brook. He reached the brick wall and got up, pressing close to it, and in five seconds he was in the woodshed, leaning against the tool-bench, getting his breath.

  When he jerked the door open (“Ridiculous? Jesus!” he would tell them all later), plunging in with the rifle leveled, the kitchen was empty. The door to the living room stood open, as always, and he knew before he reached it that there was no one there. There was no one in the dining room, the library, the pantry, or the downstairs bedroom—he went through each room, turning on the lights—and no one on either the front or back stairs, no one on either the second floor or the third. There was nothing, no one in the house but himself and his things.

  And now, rational at last, he recognized with terrible clarity the hollowness of his life. He saw, as if it had burned itself into his mind, the image of Callie, Henry, the baby, and the dog, grouped in the warm yellow light of the porch. If Henry Soames had crept through wet grass and mud that way to protect what was his, it would have meant something. Even if it had been all delusion, the mock heroics of a helmeted clown, it would have counted.

  “Fool!” he whispered, humiliated and hot from head to foot with anger, meeting his eyes in the mirror, ready to cry.

  The rifle crooked in his arm was heavy, and he glanced down at it. It was old as the hills—a 45–70 Springfield from 1873, an officer’s model, according to the chart in Shotgun News—yet there was still blue on the barrel, beautiful and cool against the mellow brown of the walnut stock. It was a rare thing to find one that old that still had the blue. Most people wouldn’t notice or think it was important, but, just the same, it was a rare find; a thing that should be preserved. And then he thought, feeling a flurry of excitement, as though he were about to discover something: 1 was never more scared in my life. My God. Right from the first minute, I thought I’d had it. He went back into the kitchen to hunt up a polishing rag and some whiskey. He figured he’d earned it.

  V

  THE DEVIL

  1

  Simon Bale was a Jehovah’s Witness. He would appear one Sunday morning in the dead of winter, early, standing on your porch, smiling foolishly and breathing out steam, his head tipped and drawn back a little, like a cowardly dog’s, even his knees slightly bent, his Bible carefully out of sight inside his ragged winter coat, and his son Bradley would be standing behind him, as timid as his father but subtly different from his father—not so perfectly hiding his readiness to shift from fawning to the kind of unholy fury that was going to be his whole character later—and neither Simon Bale nor his son would seem a particularly serious threat—especially on a bright December morning with a smell of January thaw in the wind and churchbells ringing far in the distance, the blue-white mountains falling away like Time. All it took to get rid of the two was the closing of a door.

  Until his fifty-fourth year, Simon Bale worked as a night clerk at the Grant Hotel in Slater. It was a four-storey, blackish red-brick building as square as a box, flat, stale, manifestly unprofitable, stained with rust from the eaves that hadn’t held in their water for longer than anyone in Slater could remember. The lobby was the size of an ordinary country parlor, a faded and threadbare rug on the floor like the rugs you find in the Sunday school rooms of country churches, the pattern no longer distinguishable, vaguely floral. On the rug stood an old, sprung davenport, a couple of squarish armchairs from the forties, a rickety checker table over against the wall, piled high now with magazines, a television in the corner. Old men lived there, and a couple of women whose business Simon quietly and patiently endured. It was not a proof of remarkable broad-mindedness in Simon, that quiet endurance of what he himself called harlotry, and no proof that he was a hypocrite, either. Their wickedness was one with the general corruption of the times, one of many signs that the end was at hand. They would burn for eternity, it went without saying, but so would most of the rest of mankind—for pride, for covetousness, for forgetting the Sabbath, for believing the devil to be dead. Confronted by evils so overwhelming, a man could only look to the state of his own soul and, on Sunday mornings, go out on his futile, stubbornly persistent rounds, giving the warning—to whole families, if possible; to the husband alone, if only the husband would listen; or to only the wife; or to the child alone in the yard.

  He kept leaflets on his desk, tucked inconspicuously beside the register. No one ever took one. Sometimes when the spirit moved him—when he glimpsed in the eyes of some guest a flicker of humanity answerable to his own—Simon would timidly press one of the leaflets into the hand reaching out for keys. He would even sometimes venture a joke, though humor was perilous: “Here are your keys,” he would say, smiling horribly, like a man with some disease of the nervous system. When there was no work to do he would read, never any book but one. He would run his square, black fingertip along under the words and would move his lips, not merely because he was an ignorant man or only half-literate but also because he read with intense concentration. He read the Daily News in the same way, systematically, beginning with the front page and moving to the back, column by column, skipping nothing, even when he came to the advertisements or the two comics the Daily News carried, Major Hoople and Scorchy Smith. How much he understood of what he read, and in what queer mystical fashion he understood, God only knows. Since he never read the page four continuation of a front-page story until he happened to come to it in his methodical, column-by-column way, it seems unlikely that he read with intense curiosity. Nevertheless, he read his paper every day for some forty years, which is proof, at least, of the regularity of his habits, no mean virtue. His mouth would sometimes snap shut or twitch as he read—his obsequious smile had by this time become a nervous tic—and it seems very likely it twitched because Simon was angry, or, anyway, impatient. (One thinks of the way George Loomis used to read, twenty years younger than Simon was but more like Simon than either of them would have cared to admit. He too—late at night, in his big, lonely house—read column by column, except that he never bothered about the continuations or the advertisements or, above all, the comics—except for Scorchy Smith’s half-naked women—and all the time he read (his left leg balanced on his right knee, the paper on the leg, the thumb of his left and only hand flickering nervously at his cigarette) he would wince, outraged by all that hit his eye from the machinations of Democrats and Russians to the stupidity of typesetters. Compare, on the other hand, Henry Soames, reading when he had no customers to talk to at the Stop-Off. He would lay his paper out on a table—a cup of black coffee on the top left corner of the paper, tacking it down because of the breeze from the fan on the shelf in the corner—and he would spread his arms out to left and right to lean on the table as he bent his huge bulk toward the news, and he would glance over all the headlines, moving his up-tilted head like a man hunting for the piece he needed for a jigsaw puzzle, and he’d work out in his mind what he wanted to look into first. Then he’d start, and he’d go straight to the continuation, and sometimes he’d smile or he’d murmur “Hmm,” and sometimes he’d call, “Callie, listen to this!” and would read to her aloud (which Callie Soames hated). If world events were upsetting or baffling, he’d mention the trouble to every man that came into the diner or stopped for gas, and his premise, deeper than judgment, something in his blood by now, was that somehow even the most outrageous behavior of Russians or Democrats or the Farm Bureau must make some kind of reasonable, human sense. He’d work that sense out, eventually, finding good even in the most unthinkable points of view (very often by logic that only Henry and God could fathom, and frequently only God), and from then on Henry would be nearly as moved by pronouncements made from that point of view, however Henry might disagree, as a country wom
an would be by her “Search for Tomorrow” on TV. “You’re a damn fool,” George Loomis would say. “You forget the whole secret of human progress, pure meanness.” “I don’t believe there is such a thing as pure meanness,” Henry would say, “or pure anything else.” “Well you got to have faith in something,” George would say. As for old Doc Cathey (hunchbacked, sly, infernally testy), he never read the papers at all. He never read anything, in fact, and profoundly distrusted any man who did.)

  When he finished at the Grant Hotel, at seven in the morning, Simon Bale would put on his old brownish coat and nod goodbye to Bill Hough, who clerked days, and go out to his old gray Chevy and drive himself the half-mile home to his black-shingle house just beyond the city limits. His wife would have his toast and eggs ready, and he’d eat his breakfast without a word, leaning far down over his plate and sliding in the food with his fork turned upside down, and then he’d shave himself with his electric razor and take off all but his underwear (loose jockey shorts and an undershirt with straps which he changed not more than once a month) and go to bed. He’d sleep five hours, then get up and go out on the porch with his Bible, and he’d sit there reading or meditating or dozing, or maybe watching crows making circles high above him, bringing to mind the circle in the fire, or he’d look at the mountain that rose up, awesome as Judgment Day, at the end of the valley, or at the oak tree in his yard. In August he would watch Ed Dart and his boys across the road combining wheat, which reminded Simon Bale of Christ, as did they, who were in a sense Plowmen, or Harvesters of the First Fruit, and he would smell the sweetness of the air, which bespoke in Simon’s hairy nostrils the boundless mercy of God. Around his yard there was a weathered snow fence and there were chickens in the yard, and in these too there were lessons. It was this way of seeing, above all, that made his mission hopeless. Going out on his calls on Sunday morning (his son, before the time of this story, sitting humble and surly in the car beside him, Simon himself a little on edge for lack of sleep), Simon might as well have talked ancient Hebrew to the people he called on. In a sense, he did.

  One night, long after his daughter Sarah had run off (had married a Trail ways bus driver who’d gotten her pregnant, not without coaxing on her part, a girl of fifteen with the figure of a full-grown woman and a mind arrested at seven or eight, a face as long and blank as a cannister, given to hallucinations, pursued by demons, fond to the point of lunacy of charm bracelets, pins, brooches, anklets, dime-store rings) and a short while after his son Bradley had moved out to run, with monstrous tyranny, a household of his own, Simon Bale (his thin, brownish hair now beginning to turn gray around his ears) got a phone call at the Grant Hotel. Old Chester Kittle was there and saw it all. Simon stood very still, the Bible open on the counter, the dirty red ribbon dangling out over the edge, and the tic-smile came and went again and again, in shadow now, because the dim lamp over the desk stood diagonally behind him. He looked like a man being scolded harshly—for the leaflets on the counter, perhaps, or for a pious message left by some prankster on one of the old iron beds. No one would have thought it could be anything more; nothing of much significance could be expected to happen in the life of Simon Bale. But appearances fail us. Simon Bale’s house was on fire (someone had set it, but the troopers didn’t know that yet), and his wife was in the hospital probably dying. Simon hung up the telephone and turned to the Bible and hung onto it with both hands as if it was the only thing steady in the whole dark room. Still smiling—on, off, like a face in the funhouse at the county fair—Simon started to cry, a kind of howling noise that didn’t sound like crying or laughing either but was the kind of noise a hound might make, and old Chester jumped up and went over to him, his heart and brains in a turmoil.

  2

  Simon Bale had no friends. He was not only an idealist but an ascetic as well, both by conviction and by temperament, and the death of his wife (she died early the following morning) meant the end of all ordinary contact with humanity—or would have except for Henry Soames.

  Simon was at her bedside when she died. He’d gone there at once (abandoning his desk to old Chester Kittle, who after ten minutes’ wine-befogged consideration locked the door and went to bed) and he’d sat there all night long wringing his hands and praying and weeping, in his heart knowing her lost already because of the bandages covering most of her head and because of, worse, the tubes taped to her body and rising, at the foot of the bed, to a glass bottle hanging upside down. When the doctor told him she was dead, Simon was through for now with his weeping, though not through with his grief, and he merely nodded and stood up and went out, none of them knew where. He stood on the front steps of the hospital for a long time, his hat dangling from the end of his right arm (it was spring, and the trees were green with new leaves) and then like a man in a daze he wandered across the lawn in the general direction of where his car was parked. He wandered up and down the sidewalk, still quiet and empty at six in the morning, passing and repassing the car, maybe unwilling to leave the place, maybe simply in a mental fog, unable to recognize his car when he saw it. He stopped right beside the car, at last, and stared at it for a long time, his face as white and soft as bread dough, his mouth collapsed like the mouth of a dime-store goldfish, and finally he went over to it and got in and drove back to the hotel. He let himself in by the door at the side and went to the first empty room he found and stretched out on the bed and slept. For hours he slept like a dead man. Then he dreamed his wife was alive, sewed up from one end to the other with green thread, and tranquilly glad to see him, and he woke up. It was late afternoon.

  He didn’t notice he was hungry and unshaven. He drove to the remains of his house, where everything he owned was now smoke and ashes, including his money, since Simon had never trusted banks, and he stood beside what was left of the snow fence as he’d stood this morning in front of the hospital, looking at the place as the others did—curiosity seekers, neighbors, farmers who’d happened along on their way into town to the movies or the Silver Slipper. Finally somebody recognized him and they all gathered around him to console him and ask him questions and, in general, torment him, all of which he met with a lunatic, apologetic-looking smile that made people wonder (not for the first time) if he’d set it himself. Now and then he’d bring out a stammered word that only those nearest to him caught (“Forgive,” he was saying, “Lord forgive”) and then, suddenly, he sank to his knees and fainted. They called the police. But it was not there that the troopers found him; they found him at Henry Soames’.

  It was still early, a little after eight. Henry’s little boy Jimmy was in bed; Henry’s wife was in the diner taking care of the last of the supper customers, and Henry stood in the living room in the house jutting out behind the diner, the room almost dark, only the floorlamp in the corner turned on, Simon Bale in the armchair below it, staring at the carpet as if in a daze. Standing enormous and solemn at the living room window, Henry looked out past the end of the diner at the highway and the woods beyond. He could see, past where the woods dropped away, the crests of the mountains on the far side of the valley. It was a time of day he especially liked. The mountains looked closer when the light was dimming from the sky and the clouds were red, and sounds were clearer now than they were at other times—milking machine compressors in the valley, cows mooing, a rooster’s call, a semi coming down the hill to the right with its lights on. It was as if one had slipped back into the comfortable world pictured in old engravings—in old geography books, say, or old books of maps in a law office. (The world would seem small and close when dark came, too—sounds would seem to come from close at hand and the mountains ten miles away seemed almost on top of you—but in the dark he would not feel himself a part of it; the trees and hills were like something alive, not threatening, exactly, because Henry had known them all his life, but not friendly, either: hostile, but not in any hurry, conscious that time was on their side: they would bury him, for all his size and for all his undeniable harmlessness, and even his own trou
blesome, alien kind would soon forget him, and the mountains would bury them too.) In his present mood, watching sunset come on, he felt at one with the blue-treed mountains, and at one, equally, with the man in the dimness behind him. He saw again in his mind the charred boards, ashes, dirty bubbles of melted glass, and he recalled the intense acrid smell that had filled the air for a mile around. Poor devil, he thought. He had never known Simon Bale, had hardly seen him before, but at a time like this that was hardly important. A man did what he could.

  Perhaps it was the way the light slanted in, or the way the long silver truck rolled past and went out of his hearing: Something came to him. He knew as if by inspiration how it was that a man like Bale saw the world. For an instant he too saw it: dark trees, a luminous sky, three swallows flying, all portentous. Henry half-turned, covering his mouth with his hand, and studied the man. The brown shoelace on Simon’s black right shoe (directly in the floorlamp’s beam) had been broken and knotted together again in twenty places.

  Then the troopers came. Henry wouldn’t hear of their talking to Simon until the following day, after he’d rested a little and pulled himself together. They might have insisted, but Doc Cathey came in while they were talking and took one look at Simon Bale and said, “This man’s in shock,” and, soon after, the troopers left. Henry put Simon in the bedroom off the kitchen, and Doc Cathey stayed with him a while, fussing and muttering to himself, and then Doc came out and closed the door and they sat at the kitchen table drinking coffee. Callie was with them by now.