Nickel Mountain

by John Gardner

  With the passing of time he became in reality what he was, his vision not something apart from the world but the world itself transmuted. He’d hired Billy Hartman by this time, so he could rest himself more, at Doc Cathey’s insistence, and he never served customers himself now except on special occasions—a birthday, say, or a wedding. His new detachment encouraged the mystical drift of his thoughts. He would sit with Jimmy eating supper and watching Callie at the cash register, everything around her a-glitter—the glass on the counter, the green and silver mint wrappers, the cellophane on the twenty-five-cent cigars, the glossy knotty pine wall behind her, with the picture of the pheasant on it—and Callie there in the center of it all like a candle—and he would be so moved, all at once, his eyes would fill. He was proud of her, and had a right to be proud, because she too had been changed. She would have been beautiful in any case, one way or another, Henry knew, but marrying him she had found out possibilities not only in him but in herself as well that she might never have found some other way. She never spoke of loving him but sometimes when they locked up the restaurant together she would hold his hand, or when he sat holding Jimmy, reading to him, she would pat the bald spot on his head. And so like a man half-asleep he thought about marriage, which was the same thing as love or magic or anything else he could think of (he could no more distinguish between what was happening from day to day between Callie and himself and what happened between himself and his son than he could tell the difference, except in degrees, between those and the way the restaurant changed him and he, in turn, the restaurant), and he knew, not in words, that it was true, as Emmet Slocum had said once, that people sometimes killed themselves because of the weather but nevertheless they killed themselves by choice.

  So it was that Henry Soames had discovered the holiness of things (his father’s phrase), the idea of magical change. And listening to Callie’s mother talk he began to see, he thought, why people were religious. She seemed to know nothing of holiness, Callie’s mother, no more than the preacher at Salem Baptist seemed to know; but listening to her it came to him that the words she bandied about made a kind of sense. She would sit at the piano, up at her place on a Sunday afternoon, and would sing old hymns in her shrill, hard voice, and Henry would sit over by the window in the corner, staring vaguely at the African violets by the lace curtains on the window seat, patting the knee of the child in his lap, and it would come to him that the whole thing might be true. In whisp’ring grass 1 hear him pass. Maybe he’d been wrong; maybe they’d discovered the same thing he’d discovered, and differed from him only in trying to talk about it: a vision of dust succinct with spirit, God inside wasps, oak trees, people, chickens walking in the yard. Maybe like him they had come to feel kindly toward old clothes, farmwomen’s wrinkled elbows, the foolishness of young people, expensive suits, even the endless political talk at the GLF down in Slater. And if he was wrong, he was wrong too to keep himself apart from them: What religion was was a kind of formal acting-out of what every human being felt, vague fears over things he could do nothing about, vague joys over things only partly his doing—the idea of holiness. So one day he had taken Jimmy to the Presbyterian Church in Slater.

  It was the church where Henry had gone with his mother as a child. He’d sent Jimmy up to the Sunday School and then had walked around to the front and started in himself to listen to the service. There were people on the steps, not a soul he knew, mostly young or middle-aged, one old, old man—all beautiful as lovers, as it seemed to him, in their Sunday clothes, and all happy-looking, laughing, talking—so happy he thought they must really know what he’d guessed they knew, or not knew, felt: And he had felt humble, ashamed of his monstrous bulk and remoteness, and had crossed the street to look at the washing machines in the Salway Store window until they’d gone in. Then, steeling himself, he crossed again quickly. When he went from the sunlit street to the foyer it was so dark at first he could barely see, but even so he noticed at once a frail, coy-looking elderly woman in a dark blue dress, white hat, white gloves, and he knew by instinct that the woman was there to greet him. His heart leaped, and he snapped his fingers as if he’d just remembered something and turned on his heel and fled back into the light.

  For maybe fifteen minutes he walked up and down on the sidewalk, sometimes looking at the maple trees on the church lawn, the gray stone walls, the arched windows, sometimes studying the washing machines, his blood all the while in such agitation he was afraid he might have an attack. When he got up his courage to try it again the woman was gone and the foyer was empty except for the ushers. He could hear the minister praying inside. The ushers left him to himself, and he went to the table where pamphlets were laid out. He picked up the first one that caught his eye, Predestination? in bright red on yellow, and carried it over to the door to leaf through it. It upset him. According to the pamphlet all Christians believed in Predestination, works were of no account whatever (What is human righteousness beside the perfect righteousness of God? it said), and the whole secret was to renounce the arrogant wish for free will and joyfully accept God’s Plan. When he finished reading his hands were shaking. It wasn’t so much that he disagreed; he couldn’t tell whether he agreed or not. He minded the fact that they’d spelled it out: It was not what he wanted, what he wanted was—God knew. “Idealists,” his father would have said: ministers, or the New York State troopers, or Welshmen who ran their families like the army. And then a new thought had come to him. Surely there weren’t ten people in there who knew Predestination from a turnip. They accepted whatever the minister said, and forgot about it, and carried away a vague feeling that it was better to be good than bad, unselfish than selfish, if a man could keep his mind on it, and that somehow things made sense—like the hymn they were singing now, “Faith of our Fathers,” whatever that was, not that it mattered, finally, in the least. And he felt unworthy to go where they were worshipping, and he left again to go stand humbly by the washing machines, waiting for Jimmy.

  That afternoon he’d gone hunting again, his fat hands loving on the shotgun, and had shot three squirrels that seemed to him to dance like fire on the limbs. He became what he was, with a gun in his hands: doom and doomed and serene.

  They reached the bottom of the slope and rested awhile. Henry took one of his pills, and Jimmy held the gun for him, making a show of holding it very carefully, the way Henry had taught him, the barrel aimed away and toward the ground. The earth was softer here and the grass less brittle, thick and rich yellow-green, shaded by beeches. There was a horse’s skull here somewhere, but he couldn’t think where. Hunting through the grass with his foot, he found a pair of ladies’ underpants, and he covered them up again quickly, embarrassed. They started up the hill. Above them, among the tombstones, the old man and the old woman stood solemn and silent, watching them come near.

  4

  They were digging up the body of their son. He’d died at fourteen, fifty years ago, and at that time they’d lived around these parts. Now they lived in Rochester, and since they were getting on in years, coming to the time when they had to take some thought about their final rest, they’d decided to move him to where they were going, a plot in a very nice cemetery on a hillside overlooking the Genesee. The woman was ninety-two, the man eighty-seven; their clothes hung on them like clothes on hangers. Inside his hat, and hanging down over his ears, the man had burdock leaves, and under the burdock leaves thick white hair. He had a brown, unadorned cane with a rubber tip. His skin was white as paper, with splotches on it, and he had white-blue eyes that bulged in his head like the eyes of a skittish horse. He made you think of a preacher, one of the old-timers, not the kind that cowered when he came to your door. The woman looked like a small, addled witch—sharp features, tiny black eyes that glinted like needles, a hundred thousand dirty-looking wrinkles from her collarbone to her hairline. She looked as if she had no water left in all her body, but the rims of her eyes were red. Jimmy clung with one hand to Henry’s belt and watched them.
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  “I tell Walt it don’t much matter where he lays,” the woman said, “his soul’s in Glory.” She stood sideways to Henry, her big-knuckled hands folded two inches or so below her chin, and she spoke out of the side of her mouth, her eyes fixed, as if intently, on the ground.

  “Mmm,” Henry said, nodding, thinking about it.

  The old man waved at her as if to hit her. “Oh, shut up,” he said. Then, to Henry: “She’s crazy. Always has been.”

  “Walt don’t believe in God,” the old woman said. She smiled, sly, still looking at the ground.

  Jimmy leaned forward to look around Henry at the grave-diggers. Henry put his hand on the boy’s head, glad to have an excuse to make no comment.

  “He’s dead and rotten,” the old man said. He jerked his arm, with his cane dangling from the end of it, in the general direction of the grave. Again, however incongruously, he had the look of a hell-fire preacher. He said, “Now, you shut up.”

  Henry cleared his throat, preparing to leave. “Well—” he said. He glanced over at the grave-diggers. One of the two men was down in the hole, throwing the dirt up—all you could see of him now was his hat. The other man stood at one corner, poking with a crowbar. Beyond them the hillside sloped away in sunlight and shadow, from thick glossy headstones to the taller, narrower markers over in the older section, past the statue of the Kunzmuller girl and the Kendall crypt with pine trees around it, and down to the creek, where the woods began. The shadow of a crow swept over the grass and out of sight in the trees, incredibly swift. Jimmy left Henry’s side now and walked a few feet toward the grave. He stood with his hands behind his back and watched.

  “Fine boy you got there,” the old man yelled.

  “Yes, he is,” Henry said, grinning.

  “The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away,” the old woman said. She separated her hands for a minute, and the fingers shook.

  Henry rubbed his nose and said nothing.

  “She’s crazy,” the old man said.

  “I believe in the resurrected Lord,” she said.

  Henry looked away, over in the direction of the old people’s car. It was an old green Hudson, as big and square as a truck. It had a stubborn look, a kind of solid inflexibility that was vaguely impressive. He wondered how people as old as they were could get it to go around corners. He said, “I guess we’d better be getting on home.” He took a step toward Jimmy, but the old man raised his arm.

  “My boy,” he said, then hesitated a moment, “—was fourteen.”

  “It’s a shame,” Henry said—the only thing he could think of to say, since any of the usual things one said might set the old man off. He looked at the ground, embarrassed, shaking his head and vaguely reaching for his cap.

  “Just fourteen years old,” the old man said. He raised his arms again. “I loved that boy—” Again he hesitated, hunting for words, or maybe hunting for some lost emotion, but whatever he was after it wouldn’t come and he dropped his arm and said, “Hmph.” The old woman was weeping. The old man patted her arm, but absently, staring past her, still hunting.

  “We kept his room just like it was,” the old woman said. She nodded as if someone else had said it, and rubbed her eyes with her coatsleeve, her fingers shaking.

  The old man nodded too. “But then we moved.”

  “Life goes on,” Henry said sadly, and the words filled him with a pleasant sense of grief. He thought of his own approaching death, how Callie and Jimmy would be heartbroken for a while, as he’d been heartbroken when his father died, but would after a while forget a little, turn back to the world of the living, as was right. And if it were Callie that died? or Jimmy? The question startled him, as if someone standing behind him had asked it, and instantly he put it from his mind. He glanced a little nervously at Jimmy, who’d moved closer to watch the digging.

  “You never forget,” the old man said.

  “Never!” the old woman said sharply, suddenly meeting Henry’s eyes. “When we meet him in Glory—”

  The old man said, “Shut up.”

  For a full minute nobody spoke, there was only the rhythmical scrape of the shovel and the thump of the dirt as it fell beside the grave. Far away there was a tractor plowing for winter wheat. The motor would dig in for a minute, then whir a second while the man slipped the clutch in, and then the motor would dig in again. It reminded him of something, vaguely.

  “Love—” Henry began at last, philosophically, but he couldn’t think how to finish. The old man was still patting the old woman’s arm, and, noticing it, Henry Soames half-frowned, thinking something more that he couldn’t quite get hold of. Tears were still running down the cracks in her face, and her hands were clenched together.

  One of the grave-diggers said, “There she is.” He said it as if to himself, but they all heard it, and the old man jumped, as if frightened, and touched his hat. A limp burdock leaf slipped down farther over one ear and he slapped at it, not knowing what it was. The old woman rolled her eyes toward the grave, her eyelids batting, and turned very slowly, reaching out for her husband’s arm with one hand, tugging up the front of her coat with the other, her black mouth open. After a second Henry went to her other side to help her over the grass. Jimmy was right at the edge of the grave now, on hands and knees, looking down.

  “You keep back, Jimmy,” Henry called, but Jimmy pretended not to hear, and Henry let it go. They inched over the grass, the two old people bent forward stiffly, clinging to each other, both their mouths open now, sucking in air. The old man’s head was shaking as the woman’s hands had before, and at every step he ran his tongue over his lower lip. He leaned heavily on his cane, and the cane’s rubber tip pushed down in the ground, interfering with the progress he couldn’t have made without it. When they were within five or six feet of the place, the man with the crowbar said, “We’ve hit the box. She’ll still be a while yet.” They stopped, and the old man stood leaning on his cane with both hands, breathing hard and rolling his head.

  “You ought to sit down,” the old woman said.

  He looked at her angrily but said nothing, still laboring for breath.

  The old woman said, “We ought to left him lay.”

  “A family should keep together,” the old man said. As soon as the words were out, a coughing fit came over him. Henry watched helplessly, the old woman leaning on his arm.

  “Our Bobby was struck by lightning,” the old woman said, meeting Henry’s eyes again. “It was God’s hand.”

  The old man was furious, but he went on coughing.

  “I believe in the resurrected Lord,” the old woman said again now, taking advantage of her husband’s inability to speak. “Walt don’t believe.” She smiled. Then she said: “He was only fourteen.”

  “He’s dead and rotten,” the old man yelled, “it’s the Law of Nature! Consider the lilies—” He coughed again, a thick, racking cough that threatened to turn him inside out.

  “God forgive this poor sinner,” the old woman said, grim, and the old man swung his cane at her but missed and jabbed it back in the ground just in time, thrown off balance.

  “Here now,” Henry said. He glanced over at Jimmy but he hadn’t seen it, he was still looking down in the hole. He was lying on the ground now, his trousers low and his skin very white between his belt and the bottom of his T-shirt.