Nickel Mountain

by John Gardner

  Simon went pale, and his hands, busy buttoning his shirt, stopped moving. He had a wart on the knuckle of his middle finger, and Callie couldn’t help but wonder if it came from his never getting clean. He smiled, just a flicker, as if in fright, and said, “The Lord will provide.”

  “The hell he will,” Doc Cathey said.

  “Now, Doc,” Henry said.

  “Well she can’t stay there in the hospital morgue,” Doc said. “One way or another she’ll have to be buried. What kind of fun’ral do you people normally put on?”

  Simon looked as if his mind had stopped. “The Lord—” he said. Then he said, suddenly awake for an instant, “Every nickel we had—” He looked at Callie, as if in panic, then over at Henry.

  “You mean to say you let it burn?” Doc said. His face squeezed shut with fury and he shook his head. He fumbled with the hearing-aid button on his vest.

  “Simon, don’t you have any friends you can turn to?” Callie said.

  He looked smaller than ever, as it seemed to Henry. Like a woodchuck beset by dogs. He folded his hands and sat thinking, or daydreaming, perhaps, the frightened smile playing on his face, on and off. At last he said, and this time he knew what he was saying—there was no question of it now—“The Lord will provide.”

  “Faddle,” Doc Cathey said. He reached for the bag by his foot.

  But Simon looked up sharply, his mouth open, raising his clasped hands a little, like a man with handcuffs on, the muscles of his face tense, and the brightness that had come into Simon’s eyes made even Doc Cathey stop and wince and listen.

  “Or ever the silver cord be loosed,” Simon said, “or the golden bowl be broken, or the pitcher be broken at the fountain, or the wheel broken at the cistern, then shall the dust return to the earth as it was; and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it.”

  Doc Cathey leered as if with some sort of vicious triumph. “Much study is a weariness of the flesh,” he said. “Who pays the mortician?”

  “It’s of no importance,” Simon said. “Dust to dust.”

  “What?” Doc said. He leaned closer, turning his hearing aid toward Simon.

  “Of no importance,” Simon said again.

  They were like a couple of old witches, the two little men sitting knee to knee, bright-eyed as a couple of hawks. Doc Cathey said, “I believe you’d just roll her in a ditch and leave her lay!”

  “Stop it,” Callie said, startled.

  But Doc Cathey had understood.

  “A living dog is better than a dead lion,” Simon said, “for the living know that they shall die: but the dead know not any thing, neither have they any more a reward; for the memory of them is forgotten.”

  “Now Simon, you don’t know what you’re saying,” Henry said, and Callie felt a flush of pleasure, as if he’d defended her.

  But Doc Cathey lifted his hand to hush him. “Yes, he does,” he said, looking at Simon for the first time as though he were in some sense human, not actually human, maybe, but related. “He’s saying the body in the morgue has nothing to do with his wife, let the County take it. And maybe he’s right, at that.”

  “That wouldn’t be decent,” Henry said, but Callie said, “If that’s what Simon wants—”

  Simon said, “I will rejoice. I will divide Shechem, and mete out the valley of Succoth.” Then, abruptly, as though it had been coming for a long time, waiting for the magic word Succoth, Simon began to cry as he’d cried this morning, but not so violently now. Jimmy had paid no attention to their talk, but he turned quickly, when Simon started crying, and looked up.

  “Well somebody better see to some kind of arrangement,” Doc Cathey said. He stood up.

  Henry looked at the floor, upset. “I’ll drive down tonight and see what needs to be done,” he said.

  Simon continued to cry, but without a sound, wiping his eyes with his knuckles.

  Jimmy said, forgetting all about him, “Go to the store with Daddy!”

  “Hush,” Henry said. “Nobody’s going to the store.”

  Callie said, “Simon, why don’t you come into the diner and have some supper.” He didn’t answer, made only a confused sign with his head, something between a headshake and a nod. She came over and stood beside him, but she made no move to touch him. When she saw that he was about to reach in his pocket for his handkerchief, she crossed over to the cupboard above the sink and brought back the Kleenex. Simon blew his nose.

  Henry walked out on the front-door steps with Doc Cathey and closed the door behind him. There Doc Cathey paused and got out his vestpocket watch and opened it and looked longer than he needed to at the time. He said at last, “They’re funny damn people.” He shook his head.

  Henry looked past him at the diner and the valley and the hills beyond, but he was seeing none of it. He saw, instead, Simon Bale as he’d sat nearly all day on the bench in the garden, like a man in a daze, with Jimmy at his feet. He walked down the steps with Doc Cathey and slowly along the gravel walk that led around the diner to the front, where Doc had his car. He said at last: “You don’t still think he set that fire himself?”

  “I dunno,” Doc Cathey said. “I suppose I don’t.”

  “You wouldn’t if you’d seen him this morning,” Henry said. He opened the car door and Doc Cathey got in, very slowly, pulling himself up in with one hand on the steering wheel, the other on the seat back, and drew the door shut behind him and hunted in his coat pocket for his key ring.

  “Likely not,” Doc Cathey said at last. Then for a minute he stopped hunting for his keys and sat perfectly still, thinking. He tilted his head and looked over his glasses at Henry. “You be careful,” he said. It wasn’t as if he knew something more than he cared to say or even as if he had an uneasy hunch. It was some kind of half-pitiful, half-revolting plea, an old man pretending the years brought wisdom they hadn’t brought, wanting to be first to have given the warning if anything bad should come of all this, but wanting it without the faintest notion of whether what was coming would be bad or good.

  “Oh, don’t worry, Doc,” Henry said. He slapped the old man’s shoulder.

  Doc Cathey went back to hunting for his keys and found them at last and started up the car. Oil smoke bloomed up from underneath as if the car had caught fire. Henry stood with his arms folded, watching the old man pull away. Then, taking his time, brooding, he went back to the diner. He’d no sooner closed the door than the bell rang, calling him back to the pumps.

  It was after six when Henry drove down to the hospital in Slater. He drove slowly, ponderously erect in the seat, as always, the steering wheel rubbing against his belly, and all the way down the winding road he wondered what the devil he was going to do. It wasn’t right that the woman should be shoveled away into a pauper’s grave and forgotten: Sooner throw her on a manure spreader like the carcass of a calf and haul her away to some gulley. He’d said to Callie’s mother, “What do you think? Would the Church have money for that sort of thing?” and she’d said, “The Baptist Church?” He’d pursed his lips and drummed on the tabletop. “No, I guess they wouldn’t,” he’d said. “The County handles hundreds of cases like that,” Callie’s mother had said. “It’s no shame, these days. Since buryings have gotten to be so expensive, some people get the County to do it even when they truly don’t need to. Some people think it’s a shame to spend money on the dead instead of the living. You should hear Frank talk about that!” Henry had nodded. He’d heard. There wasn’t anybody in this half of the state that hadn’t heard Frank Wells on funerals. But you could bet your bottom dollar old Frank would go in style: She’d see to it for spite.

  The white guard posts curved down and down, on his right, and he could look off and see the whole valley like a painting, the river smooth and silent as mercury, reflecting the trees. This side of the trees there were flat acres of winter wheat and peas and hay and stretches of new-plowed ground. It was like a garden, in the gold light of late afternoon; it was exactly what Paradise ought to be like: a
tractor humming along, far below him, small, on the seat a boy with a wide straw hat; to the right of the tractor, red and white cows moving slowly down the lane to a big gray barn with clean white trim. With a little imagination a man could put angels in the sky, the kind in Bible illustrations, and great golden clouds like those. Except of course that eternity wasn’t going to be like that. No tractors, in any case, or trees, or fields. Whatever good you might say of the spirit, you had to give the things of earth their due—silver cords and golden bowls and whatever else it was. He thought all at once of the old country cemetery up on the hillside behind his house, where his father and mother were buried. There’d been a road through there twenty, twenty-five years ago, but they’d moved the highway now and the place was isolated, you couldn’t reach it in a car except by driving down a two-rut lane like a cowpath through overgrown meadow. He would see it sometimes when he went up onto the ridge to hunt, and each time—especially in late afternoon, when the light was queerly charged, the way it was now—it would be as if he were discovering the place for the first time: a natural garden that had been the same for a thousand thousand years. All at once he said to himself, startled, “Why not?” The reasons why not rushed over him like August rain, and he put the thought out of his head and kept it out until he stepped into the long, tiled hall in the basement of the Enloe Memorial Hospital, where the smell of formaldehyde made his stomach turn, and the girl in white and blue beside him—she couldn’t be more than seventeen, no more than a baby—said, “You think this is bad, you should watch them do an autopsy! Glaagh!” He looked at her in alarm. “Have you seen an autopsy?” he said. She shrugged. “Dozens of times. They take this saw—” she drew a line around her forehead from ear to ear “—and they lift off the top of the head like a bottlecap.”

  They showed him the body. Henry Soames stood huge and sagging, his skin gray, and stared in disbelief at the woman’s indignity. Her burnt flesh smelled like hoof rot. The doctor or attendant (he couldn’t tell which) at the desk said, “Who’ll be handling the funeral?”

  “Wiegerts’ Funeral Home,” he said. The words came out calm and flat, but his heart was racing and the skin of his neck tingled.

  “You a relative?” the man asked.

  “No, a friend,” Henry said. “But I’m to take charge of it.”

  The man got out papers, and Henry thought again of Callie and, worse, of Callie’s mother, and he shut his eyes for a quick, dead serious prayer to whatever might be up there to watch over fools and children.

  It wasn’t until he faced his wife, two hours later—he’d stopped at Wiegerts’ before coming home—that he fully realized the magnitude of what he’d done. “Callie,” he said at once, bravely, but his knees went weak underneath him, and he said only, “how is he by now?”

  “All right, I guess,” she said. “I really can’t tell.”

  She was in the dining room, sewing. Scraps were spread from one end of the room to the other. “He surely is good with Jimmy, I’ll have to hand it to him.” She pressed on the sewing machine pedal, and Henry waited for the noise to finish.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Oh, you know,” she said, “just the way Jimmy’s taken to him. You never have to wonder where Jimmy is at all. It’s like having a full-time baby-sitter.”

  Henry laughed, but hollowly, his heart sinking with the returning thought of the money Callie believed they still had sitting in the bank. He swallowed.

  She said, “But I can’t say Mom’s very happy about it.”

  He thought with a sudden leap of excitement that he still might stop the check. At least he could have paid on “time.” He was sweating. “Well, good,” he said. He smiled, white.

  “Good?” She looked up. “—That Mom’s not happy?”

  He was rubbing his sweating hands on the front of his pantlegs. “I meant something else,” he said.

  She squinted at him, but after a minute she let it go. She was used to his seeing things in queer ways, and maybe it didn’t seem worth the trouble of straightening out. “Well, anyways—”

  At that moment, upstairs in his bedroom, Jimmy screamed. Henry ran for the stairs, off the kitchen, and Jimmy screamed again.

  When Henry reached the bedroom door, Jimmy was sitting bolt upright in bed, shaking like a leaf. Henry scooped him up in his arms, and the child clung to him. “Hurt,” he cried, “hurt!”

  “What was it?” Callie cried, behind him.

  But Jimmy was relaxed now. It couldn’t be that he was sick.

  “Nothing,” Henry said, “a dream. It’s all right now, eh, Jimmy?” Henry’s heart was thudding.

  Callie leaned close. “What did you dream, Jimmy?”

  Already Jimmy was halfway back to sleep.

  “You see, it really was nothing,” Henry said softly. “Kids always start having nightmares around his age. He’s over it already.”

  Callie kissed Jimmy’s cheek and patted his back, her eyes troubled, and gently Henry laid him in his crib. Callie stood with her hands on the crib rail, looking down. After a long time she turned to look at Henry, her face white and indistinct in the darkness. She said, “Henry, I’m scared.”

  “Of what?” he said, exasperated.

  “How do I know?” she said. “I’m just scared, that’s all. Really. Aren’t you?”

  He looked past her, out the window at the silhouettes of the pines where they rose out of fog. It was still now, as it always was when the fog came in, as if nothing were left alive. The fog hadn’t gotten to the garden yet. The moon was bright, and if there had been rabbits there he would have seen them.

  Well, yes, he thought, yes. He tried to think what it was George Loomis had said. It wasn’t here, it was up outside Utica; they’d driven up to the stock car races. He’d mentioned Jimmy, how he’d felt the time Jimmy had had the convulsions, and George Loomis had said—who lived alone, who kept intact his isolation despite all pressures, finally, and would someday die, in his barn, maybe, and not be discovered for two, three weeks—“You take on a responsibility like that, and you say to yourself you’ll move heaven and earth to protect the kid you love, or the woman, or whoever it happens to be, but the minute you say it you’re forgetting something.”

  “What’s that?” Henry had said.

  George Loomis stared down into the night, leaning forward over the steering wheel, and he said, “You can’t.”

  “It’s what drives you to God,” Henry said with a little laugh.

  George too had laughed, like a murderer.

  6

  That same night, two hours after Jimmy’s cry, Henry sat at his kitchen table, catching up his books. It was long past his bedtime. Normally he was careful to get to bed by ten, doctor’s orders, but he knew it would be no use tonight. By now he felt downright panicky at what he’d done down in Slater. Even without any trimmings whatever, everything plain as plain could be (a thing old Wiegert seemed to find distressing), his bank account would be lighter by six hundred dollars. He couldn’t believe he’d done it, now. Sweat ran down his chest, and the more he tried to think why he’d done it, the wilder it seemed. It would be one thing if he were all alone, no family to think about. He’d often acted on crazy whims before he’d married Callie. Maybe he’d gone un-married too long. It was hard as the devil to change the whole pattern of your life when you got to your forties.

  The fog lay all around the house now, sealing it up like a box. At every window he saw his own reflection, but when he let his mind wander he was aware of the others; it was as if he could hear them breathing: Simon just on the other side of that door straight in front of him, Callie and Jimmy just up the stairs that opened onto the kitchen to his right. Outside, nothing moving. A hundred thousand birds would start singing when the sun came up, and in the valley cows would move in from their pastures toward lighted barns. In the fields, mice, woodchucks, rabbits, dogs would run, when dawn came, and the mountainsides would be rife with wild things, from squirrels to foxes—but just now,
nothing. But no, that was wrong of course. Fog or no fog, everything was the same as always, animals stalking animals stalking animals in deadly procession, quiet as dreams.

  She’d had plans for that money. He’d never agreed to Callie’s plans, but it was settled between them that one of these days they would have it out; he’d had no right to spend six hundred dollars on something insane. Unless maybe that was why he’d done it: not for Simon’s wife but against his own.

  (He remembered vividly the way cows would push at the fences on his grandfather’s farm. Even if you pastured them in clover and the other side was barely stubble, still they’d push to get out. He and his father and grandfather would go out in the middle of the night—two fat old men and a fat little boy—and they’d shout at the cows and turn them around with pitchfork handles, and the cows would go anywhere on earth but where you wanted them. When you finally got them to the open gate or the hole in the fence, you had to twist their tails to run them through.)

  But that wasn’t all of it. He remembered the way Callie had reached out, finally, and touched Simon Bale when he was crying.

  The thought was comforting for a minute, but the next minute he wondered if he would have brought Simon here at all if it weren’t for the others who’d stood above him doing nothing. There was a story about two old brothers named Sprague—a true story, Jim Millet said. They’d lived together in Slater all their lives, and when they were eighty they’d sold their house and moved down to Florida. Nobody knew them there, and the second day one of them killed the other with an axe, just like that, nobody ever learned why. It would never have happened if they’d stayed where they belonged, Jim Millet said. The man had never done a thing to cover up his crime. He’d carried the body to the garage and shut it up, and as soon as it started to smell, the neighbors found it.