Nickel Mountain

by John Gardner

  “Here’s what,” Ben said. “I’ll give you five-to-one the clock ain’t there.”

  Judkins shook his head. “No, sir. You pay for the punch and the clock’s half yours, half mine, because I showed you where it is.”

  Ben looked at him, and slowly he reached in his pocket for change and paid for the punch. The clock wasn’t there. Old Man Judkins stood with his head back, holding his old straw hat in his hand, looking surprised, and when he was sure the clock was really not there he shrugged. “Hunch was wrong,” he said.

  Days went by and it still didn’t rain, and all of them grew more edgy. Old Man Judkins said, as though Callie Soames had not lived in farm country all her life (and yet she listened, remembering hand-loaded wagons of hay, thrashing crews, wheat standing on the hillsides in shocks): “It never changes. They bring in all them new machines, put all them chemicals into the ground, get dairies with a hundred cows, but they still got to wait on the land. Progress, they say. But th’ earth don’t know about progress. No rain, that means no corn and no hay, no feed in the winter. The old days, they might have trucked it in, but not now. Fifty cows was a real big barn in the old days, and two men could clean the gutters in half an hour. Now they got gutter cleaners—seven thousand dollars they cost, and you got to pay for it month by month, summer or winter, whether or not you got hay in the barn, because banks don’t care about hay. We used to make it, in the old days, no matter how long the rain held off. But the way things are now, you can’t compete without gutter cleaners and diesel tractors, combines, balers, crimpers, blowers, grain silos, motor-run unloading machines, hammermills, sorters, all the rest. Lou Millet bought that farm of his for four thousand dollars, house included. You know how deep he’s in right now? A hundred thousand. Fact. Can’t even sell it.”

  She shook her head.

  “No chance any more of winning,” he said. “They just try and survive.” Old Man Judkins looked at her with his head cocked; then down at his hands. They were gnarled and liver-spotted and scarred, and she remembered suddenly what Jim Millet had said, the day of George Loomis’s accident: “The goddamn cylinder was going around and around. You could see slivers of bone—I never see nothin’ like it—red with blood and then redder in half-a-second, and the blade chewing away.”

  She said quickly, “I guess the oldtimers had their troubles too.”

  Old Man Judkins looked at her, and after a minute he smiled again. “You talk about the old days and everybody gets impatient. Things are getting better and better, that’s what people have got to believe. Say it ain’t so and they know for sure you’re an old codger, not right in the head. Prophet of doom, they say.”

  Callie said, “You have to have faith.”

  The old man bent his head, drawing a square with one finger on the counter-top, moving the finger around and around the square. She said it again, as though it were important, louder this time, to penetrate what she knew was not mere deafness. “You have to have faith, Mr. Judkins.” She glanced at the sleeping dog, and her heart caught.

  Fred Judkins’ finger stopped moving, and after a long time he looked up again, lips puckered. “No,” he said. “You have to have the nerve to ride it down.”

  But at least about this much Old Man Judkins was right: If it didn’t rain soon every one of them would be finished. Henry said so, Doc Cathey said so, even Jim Millet said so. One night—Henry wasn’t there at the time—Jim Millet said, joking, the tobacco cud bulging in his whiskered cheek, “You want the truth, it’s all Nick Blue’s fault. He could’ve done a rain dance for us a month ago if he’d wanted to, but you think he’ll do it? Hell, no!”

  They all laughed except Nick Blue, sitting straight-backed and solemn-faced, smoke going up from his nostrils past his small sharp eyes, and Ben Worthington, Jr., said, as if fiercely, “He’s trying to get his land back, that’s what it is.”

  Jim Millet slapped the counter. “You hit it on the head! That goddam redskin’s got it in his mind he’ll break us all and get back his heritage.” He chewed fast, like a rabbit.

  “Now, Jim,” Callie said.

  But they liked the joke too well to leave it.

  “Nick Blue’s a smart man,” Ben Worthington, Jr., said. “He don’t talk a whole lot, but he thinks.” He tapped his temple.

  The two truckers at the counter grinned without turning.

  Lou Millet said, “Ah, you’re too hard on him, Ben.” He smiled, though. Even Lou was capable, these days, of going further than he’d dream of going some other time.

  Jim said, “I bet you couldn’t get him to dance. I bet he wouldn’t do it for nobody!”

  The truckers glanced at Nick and smiled. Nick sat as still as ever, as if made out of wood, moving only his cheeks when he puffed at the cigarette.

  Then all at once they were standing up, Jim Millet and Ben Worthington, Jr., and Emery Jones’ albino hired man, and the trucker by the cash register was watching them, smiling, as if half-thinking of getting up too.

  Callie pursed her lips.

  Nick sat quietly smoking as though he were deaf, and when they were standing behind him, leering like monkeys, he put the cigarette down and squared his shoulders more.

  “Now, that’s enough,” Lou Millet said.

  Old Man Judkins watched calmly, as if he’d seen it all many times.

  “Come on now, Nick,” Ben Worthington, Jr., said, “have some mercy, eh?”

  Nick turned his head like a man bothered by a fly on his shoulder, his yellow-brown forehead wide and smooth, slanted like an ape’s, and for a long moment everything was still, as if even the wind had suddenly stopped to listen. Then, for no reason, it was over. They laughed—even Nick Blue was smiling—and they slapped his shoulders and told him, by God, he could take a joke, and then they went back to their counter stools, still laughing. Callie leaned on the counter. She said suddenly, as if to all the room, “What ever became of the Goat Lady?”

  They seemed to think about it. Nobody knew.

  “Do you think she ever found him, heading off blind like that?”

  Nobody knew.

  Late that night, in the kitchen (Jimmy not asleep, as they thought, but standing on the stairs, in the dark), Callie said: “Henry, I saw Simon Bale.”

  “What?” he said.

  She frowned, realizing for an instant that perhaps it had not really happened.

  “There’s no such thing as ghosts,” he said. “What if Jimmy was to hear you, talking like that.”

  She felt sick, and the absurd conviction came over her that if she let herself turn to the window Simon would be there, his face yellowish-gray against the dark of the mountains. But she knew he wasn’t there, and to prove to herself that she knew, she kept from turning.

  “He wants to tell us something,” she said. It came to her that that was not so. He had nothing to say to them.

  Henry said, “He spoke to you?” His eyes were slits, and she knew what he was thinking. He said, “Callie, you dreamed it.”

  She thought about it.

  After a long time, as if by accident, as if not having meant to say it aloud, he said, “What does he want to tell us?”

  “You’ve seen him, then?”

  “No. Of course not.”

  The round white pain came under her collarbone.

  “What did you think he wanted to tell us?”

  “I don’t know.”

  After that they were silent again for a long time. When Callie finally spoke, her words came out in a rush. “It’s simple. He was an evil man and now he’s tormented. He lived with us all those weeks passing out his pamphlets to people in the diner and scaring Jimmy with his talk of the devil, and now he knows. He’s afraid he poisoned us. It wasn’t true.”

  “You need to get more rest,” Henry said. “You’ve been worried lately. And this heat.” He looked at the table-top, biting his upper lip and squinting. He got one of the little white pills out of the bottle in his shirt pocket. He was remembering how he would sit in h
is car up on Nickel Mountain, in the old days, and the fog would be there all around him like a sea, and strange thoughts would come into his mind. He would think strange thoughts, knowing they were not true, strange, and knowing he could suspend the knowledge that what came into his mind was unreal, and he would savor that queer freedom the way he savored the smell of Catskill air at night or savored the obscure, continually shifting patterns in the fog around his headlights. When the night was clear he would push the old rattletrap Ford as hard as it knew how to go, and turning into a curve he would know exactly where the line lay between making it and not, and he would ride that line as he rode the line down the center of the highway, conscious every second of the choices on either side. He’d gone to stock car races once with George Loomis, and he’d been surprised: George Loomis wanted them to hit, wanted somebody killed, and he’d said, “Admit it, Henry, so do you.” “No,” he’d said. They’d looked at each other and they’d understood—as though everything had suddenly snapped into focus, past, present, future: They profoundly disagreed.

  “He’ll destroy us,” Callie said, wildly now, no longer knowing what she was saying.

  She thought of the Preacher, carefully avoiding the spatters of manure, her father carefully avoiding the Preacher, the milking machines chugging regularly, and she remembered: “You never think of anybody but yourself, that’s truly all you think about,” her mother struggling against him futilely, stupidly, as once, wrongly, he too had struggled, hitting her for it, forgetting the truth that you had to ride it down. She remembered the day No. 6 died. They had to saw the stanchion off to get out the corpse, and they dragged it out of the cowbarn with a log-chain that peeled the dead hide off the leg; they tipped it over the bluff with crowbars, and when it rolled down over the tin cans, boxes, buggy-wheels, bedsprings, rusted fencewire, kettles, crocks—the corrupting record of seven generations—her father and the two hired men had yelled like Indians, with glee. It was natural that cows die, and fitting. One had no need for faith in what was reasonable, because they would survive. Faith was for what made no sense. She said again, with conviction: “He’ll destroy us.”

  But Henry shook his head, squinting at her, “No, he’ll save us.”

  And instantly Callie knew, in the mind-fogging heat, that he was right.

  He got up early, the following morning, and most of the day he helped her in the diner. But he went on eating, and nothing she did was any use.

  6

  All Old Man Judkins knew was this: that in George Loomis’s barn, among spinning wheels and casques and antique farm tools, half-hidden under an old tarpaulin, there stood a pink and purple goatcart, the rear end shaken or smashed to bits, the spokes of the left rear wheel broken. Maybe someone had run into it, maybe it had gone over a cliff; he couldn’t tell. And he knew, too, that whenever anyone asked him about her, George Loomis said he’d never seen the Goat Lady—which sounded reasonable enough, except for that goatcart he had in the barn. For what would even the Goat Lady want on Crow Mountain? She’d have had to pull off the main highway and travel two miles up steep, winding gravel road, beechwoods on either side of her, an occasional sharply sloping haylot, ahead of her nothing but more steep road, beechwoods, haylots, one or two abandoned-looking houses and, off in the woods, out of sight from the road but marked by a blue and white state historical marker, a crumbling pre-Revolutionary lookout tower.

  He’d stumbled on the cart by accident. The odds against anybody else’s stumbling onto it, or knowing what it was in that barnful of junk—especially since nobody ever came here—were a thousand-to-one. He’d been out walking one morning, as usual, because of a theory he had about arthritis—a theory he’d picked up from Albertus Magnus’s Egyptian Secrets years ago—and, as he did sometimes, he’d decided to turn up Old Joseph Napoleon Road, for the red raspberries and the view of the valley and to see how the tower was holding up. He was thirsty when he got to George Loomis’s place, partly thirsty for ginger water, partly for talk, so he went up to George’s door. There was nobody home. He went out to the cowbarn but that was empty too, the stables swept clean and powdered with lime, the rear doors wide open to let in the sun and air, and so he went on through the cowbarn and over to the old horsebarn, now storage-shed, and there he saw the goatcart. He was tired from walking, every blamed bone in his body aching, and he sat down on the flat rock by the door and pulled a timothy shoot and chewed the end. When the timothy shoot got stringy he took out his pipe, stoked it, and lit it. On principle, he did not speculate, merely looked around him at the farm.

  It looked like a nigger’s place. The fences were bad, the barbwire strung loosely, toggled to the fenceposts with baling wire—because, no doubt, you couldn’t both nail and stretch with just one arm—and the weeds along the fencelines hadn’t been cut in at least three years. The hayfield dropping away from where he sat was eroded and pitted, too rough to get over with a tractor by now, and the hay in it was brown, with bright patches of mustard weed, and long past prime, no good even for pasture, even if he somehow got a fence around it. The beehives at the foot of the hill looked abandoned. And the place was dry, of course. To the right of where Old Man Judkins sat, up the slope to the cowbarn from the tractor-shed, the barnyard was so dry it was powdery, like a hogpen that hasn’t been used in years, or like ashes. Birds had overrun the place, both good and bad, pigeons, sparrows, woodpeckers, starlings, chippies, swallows, finches, robins. The beanloft would be caked with their droppings, the granary thick with nests, even down in the oats. There was no water at all in the big iron tub, and no gutting of the ground below from spillover, which meant George Loomis was taking it easy on the watering these days, maybe because his well was low, maybe because it was dry already and he was hauling his water in in milkcans, paying money for it, or promising to pay with labor—if he had that much nerve.

  He waited for the pipe to grow cool in his hand, then got up, stiff from sitting so long, his rear end numb, and went over to the burdocks growing by the side of the tractor-shed. He picked four leaves and laid them out inside his hat, with excessive care, then he put on the hat and started home.

  That night he went up to George Loomis’s place again, not walking this time but driving his truck. He wore the same clothes he always wore, bib overalls, frock, the disintegrating straw hat, his pipe in his teeth. The lights were all out, as usual, but in the high, rounded kitchen windows he could see the flicker of the television. Old Man Judkins knocked, then leaned one hand on the cool brick of the wall and waited. The air around him was breathless and muggy, and the music from the TV sounded unnaturally loud, like water rushing down a gorge. “You’d better sit down for this,” a man’s voice said, and then a woman’s voice: “Something’s happened to Walter! Oh, please! You’ve got to tell me!” Old Man Judkins knocked again and, abruptly, the sound went off but not the picture.

  George Loomis called from the middle of the room, “Who is it?”

  “Fred Judkins,” he said. He took his pipe from between his teeth in case he should need to say it again, more clearly. But he heard the clump of George Loomis’s boot-brace coming. The door opened.

  “ ’Mon in,” George said.

  Old Man Judkins took off his hat.

  For maybe fifteen seconds they looked at each other in the near darkness as if George had been expecting him; then Old Man Judkins went past him and over to the table. There was only one chair that looked safe to sit on, the wired-up, straight-backed chair facing the television, and George went into the living room for another, one of his mother’s antiques, spindly and black, with flowers and birds painted on it. When he came back he said, “Whiskey?” He had a glass of his own on the table.

  “No thanks,” Old Man Judkins said. “Milk, mebby, if you got it.”

  George went over to the icebox, carried the pewter milkpitcher over to the sink and took a peanut butter glass from the drain-rack. He brought over cottage cheese and jam and two china dishes and two paper-thin, tarnished spoons. Then,
formally, they both sat down.

  “Long time since you come up here,” George said.

  “Yes it is.”

  They looked at the table between them. They’d traded work in the old days—not George and Fred Judkins but Fred Judkins and George’s father. Old Man Judkins could remember when George Loomis was no bigger than Henry’s boy was now—and exactly as much like an elf or an angel or any other natural thing—crawling around on the floor while his mother worked bread dough right here at this table. Long time, he thought, and nodded. In the corner of the living room that he could see from where he sat, he could make out the shiny arm of an elephantine, old-fashioned couch, a table with a bird cage on it, and a lamp with Tiffany glass.

  “How have you been?” George said.

  “I still get around,” he said.

  Their faces were white, with no light but the flicker of the television. They looked like dead men returned after a long time to an empty house to say some trifling, insignificant thing they’d forgotten to say in time. But they didn’t say it. Old Man Judkins relit his pipe, and George Loomis said, “Still living there with your daughter, Jud?”

  “No, didn’t work out. Got a room over Bill Llewellyn’s now. Better all ’round.”

  “I bet you miss the old farm, eh?” He lifted his glass and waited, respectful.

  Old Man Judkins nodded. “ ’Deed I do.”

  George grinned. “You give me about three dollars and you can have this place.” He drank.

  “Ain’t worth it, George.”

  “That’s the truth.”

  The pipe had gone out again and Old Man Judkins lit another match, but he forgot to hold it over the bowl; he was watching the silent television—a man in a cavalry uniform looking through field glasses at a hill. George looked over too.

  The quiet made Old Man Judkins remember something, but for a long time he couldn’t think what it was. Then at last it came to him. Steam. The old black steam tractor made no sound at all, sitting there opposite the thrashing machine, headed up. When they threw in the pulley the thrashing machine would begin to move, slowly at first, like something alive just beginning to wake up, the feeders rising and falling in a kind of sawing motion, utterly soundless, and then the team would bring the wagon over, that too almost soundless—the click of harness buckles, the creak of a wheel—and by now the feeders would be moving fast, a kind of whir like a ball on a string, and the crew would start working, a man on the bagger and one on the platform, two more men up on the wagon, pitching, a couple of boys hauling the grain off and bringing up new bags, no sound but from time to time the not-loud shouts of the men telling stories, joking while they worked, and the steady whir and the feeders catching the unthrashed wheat with a chìg-uff, chig-uff, chig-uff.