by John Gardner
“I beg your pahrdon?” the doctor said, smiling.
“Sorry,” he said. “Nothing.” He felt his cheeks redden.
“Oh! I didn’t mean to interrupt!” She laughed. “I talk to myself all the time. It helps you keep your mind on things, don’t you think so?”
When she’d put the reservoir lid back on—lifting it easily with mannish strength, Mickelsson doing almost nothing to help, bending down just an instant too late and grabbing with only one hand at the slimy edge, ineffectually, standing off balance—the doctor said, “Keep an eye out for rattlesnakes when you come up here. They won’t bother you, as a rule. But I always like to see them first.” She laughed again. Her face was round and bright.
He glanced at her eyes to see if there were any trace of irony behind the laughter. There was not. She was smiling sociably now, gazing over at a burned place on the hillside, as matter-of-fact as when she’d told him the sump pump would have to be replaced. (He noticed now two more gray patches where the grass had been burnt off, maybe the work of ordinary fire, maybe that of lime or acid—perhaps something to do with killing woodchucks or discouraging some troublesome weed.) Standing level with him on the mountain’s slope, the doctor was taller than he was by several inches. She stood with her arms folded, her fingers on the soft flesh just above the red, wrinkled elbows. Her hair and eyes were full of sunlight. He looked around at the tall grass, the sun-filled creepers and lacy ferns, the trunks of ash trees, maples, oaks, and one very large old cherry tree, dead, above the reservoir clearing. How one was supposed to see a snake in all this he had no idea, but that too he let pass.
“Yes,” he said, and turned to look out across the valley. He would never get over it that he’d stumbled onto such a view—in fact owned it, St. Augustine and his ilk to the contrary: the Susquehanna River wandering grandly, at royal leisure, toward the dark, decayed town out of sight around the bend; beyond the river more mountains, dark green, then blue; in the sky, two hawks. It was all like a richly glazed Romantic painting, luminous and wonderfully old, invaded here and there by shadows and—ah yes—snakes. He’d been told several times now that Susquehanna was famous for rattlesnakes. If August was dry, they came down off the mountain onto the streets of the town, heading for the river. The people simply stepped aside for them, it was said, though some of the snakes could be six feet long. He’d been no more frightened than were the people of the town (if the stories were true), though those who’d told him had intended him to be. Except in zoos, Mickelsson had never seen a rattlesnake. The idea that they were here, all around him in the woods, was interesting, faintly disquieting, nothing more. But no, that was not quite right, he corrected himself. He was pleased that there were snakes. He’d looked at a house, about a month ago, in a town called Jackson, a few miles south of Susquehanna, where a day or two earlier two large trees beside the road had been torn out by the roots by a twister. It was that, he’d realized when he thought about it, that had led him to consider buying the place. He knew the theory—Nietzsche, Sorel, Karl Jaspers when he spoke of “the abysses which lie on each side of the footpath“—that the human spirit comes alive in the proximity of danger, or perhaps one might better say, with Sartre, the presence of temptation—the temptation to sink back into Nature: bestiality and death. No doubt there was truth in it. If so, rattlesnakes were better than twisters: they were always there, steady-hearted, dependable; unlike wind, they had a certain dim intelligence or, to be precise, had almost no intelligence but were nonetheless alive: struck out from their cover of lacy ferns with murderous volition and no thought of the future. This much was sure: the snakes, like the hexes on the barns, were “something.” The fact of their existence, their indifferently deadly otherness, brought on a shudder of consciousness, a spasm of sharp awareness that one was alive. (Fancy talk; he’d readily admit it. Nevertheless, he was pleased that there were rattlesnakes.)
The doctor had turned just after he did to look out across the valley. She stood for a moment, her arms still folded, as if lost in thought, basking in the view—gazing at the railroad far in the distance, the famous stone viaduct built, according to the sign he’d seen beside the road, in 1847—then bent her head as if making some decision, and started down the path. She sang out, not turning, “The first time I saw one, I thought I’d have a stroke!” As she said it, she made a gesture with her right hand: fist clenched, knuckles forward, she moved her arm out slowly to the right of her, so exactly like a snake that his heart skipped.
“Scary things,” he said, probably too softly for her to hear. Mickelsson drew his pipe out and patted his pockets for matches, then, finding none—he’d left them, along with his hat, in the car—followed her carefully down the slippery shale path, trying to think what more he ought to ask her. Nothing came to him.
Back in the house, the doctor had walked with him again from room to room, most of them as bare as the insides of empty wooden boxes—she’d used only a little of the house—the doctor taking long, light strides, pointing out once more what wonderful views he had from every window, not another house in sight. He imagined her sweeping through the hospital corridors, coming like sunlight into her patients’ rooms, chattering with them of their children while she clamped on the blood-pressure cuff or took a pulse, exclaiming “My! Oh my!” as she’d done with the big-breasted woman in the lawyer’s office. No wonder she was liked. Such pleasure in life! It was a great mystery, these powerful, inhumanly vital spirits. In her presence he felt weak.
As they travelled through the rooms she mentioned trivial faults and problems that had slipped her mind when he’d come to look at the house the first time, with Tim. The bedrooms upstairs had no heat except what came up through the registers, it would be best to leave the doors open to pick up what came up the stairs; the livingroom floor was buckled from the moisture of the spring under the house; in the kitchen and one bedroom at the back of the house small fires—defective space-heaters, from the looks—had left smoke damage, a sort of mouldy rottenness. That reminded her that the wiring in the room he would use as his study (as he’d decided at once; it looked out on roses and a birdbath) was a farmer’s cobble, in the long run probably not safe. She shook her head sadly and laughed. Mickelsson nodded, troubled but at the same time amused by her belated concern.
When the keys were in his pocket and he was ready to leave, she had stood for a moment at the hexigrammed door that opened from the kitchen onto the livingroom, a long room grubbily panelled, carpeted in drab mustard yellow, like the lobby of a seedy motel (he would change that with wallpaper and a hardwood floor), and she’d gazed, expressionless, at some point beyond the far wall of the room, presumably trying to think what more she ought to warn him of. She was faintly smiling.
“Well, thanks very much,” he’d said. “Good luck to you in Florida.”
She hadn’t seemed to hear, so he’d cleared his throat and said again, soberly, “Well, thank you very much.”
She’d started, then turned to him, smiling more brightly, reaching out like a man to shake his hand. “Thank you,” she said. “Good luck with the house!”
“Thank you,” he’d said yet again, and then, awkwardly, turning toward the door, “Well, be seeing you.”
“Why, maybe so,” the doctor said, and laughed.
He felt himself blushing, his right hand fumbling with the keys in his pocket. Accidentally, he’d given his words peculiar emphasis.
That was all. Mickelsson had walked out to the car, backed carefully down the steep driveway onto the high-crowned hardtop road, and nosed down the mountain, presumably never to see her again. It was odd that he should feel so embarrassed about that trifling slip, that stupidly emphatic “be seeing you.” It was not so much that the phrase was childish, more appropriate to one of his freshmen or sophomores than to á philosophy professor on the dark side of fifty. It had more to do with the suggestion it carried of indifference to her life, his own as well. Indifference to the obvious truth of things. Ordina
rily not even that ought to have bothered him. One saw every day, no doubt, people one would never again lay eyes on, and one said “be seeing you” and thought nothing about it. Yet the emotion had risen in him strongly, causing him to blush. It was as if he’d let slip some truth that were better left unmentioned, as if he were warning her that he would see her, under circumstances not quite so pleasant. Absurd, of course. But there was no doubt of it, it seemed to him; that was what he’d seemed to say. Not surprising. Mickelsson wasn’t himself these days, pursued everywhere he went by the image of his wife, back in Providence with the young man she’d learned to prefer to him. “A cheerful person, watm-hearted,” she’d said—as if she too were that and her new love therefore suited her. No doubt the most primitive part of his brain still insisted it wouldn’t last. Privately, Mickelsson called the young man The Comedian. He had a quick, nervous laugh. Willard was his name. He was forever mugging, making jokes, throwing out curious, clowning gestures. In all fairness, no doubt, it was just the young man’s self-consciousness in Mickelsson’s presence. Confronted by his enemy, he put on any shape he could think of except of course his own.
“You’re a fine one to be talking about weird behavior,” Mickelsson’s wife had said.
“He hasn’t got the brains to go crazy,” Mickelsson had snapped. Then he’d turned on his heel, fleeing the conversation. In these battles of wit, he never won. His wife stood too firmly planted, firing too skillfully, too calmly. As for his son, twenty, and his daughter, seventeen, he hadn’t spoken to either of them in weeks. It was a difficult period, “a period of redefinition,” as Jessica Stark had said, her tone apologetic; she was as annoyed by rhetoric as he was.
“Where was I?” he asked himself aloud; then he remembered. No, the doctor had shown no sign that she was even aware of the stories that her house had ghosts.
He’d first learned that the house was haunted (or anyway that some people thought it to be haunted) from his neighbor from higher on the mountain, beyond the woods. “Seen any sign of them ghosts yet?” the old man asked.
Mickelsson threw a sharp look at him, interested and wary. The man was tall and old—just how old, Mickelsson couldn’t guess. He was a farmer, had been one, on that same high rocky piece of land, all his life. His hair and beard were snow-white, his hue leaden, and behind the thick bifocals, his eyes, dark blue as a mountain lake deadened by snow-flakes, had that blurred-at-the-edges look of eyes gradually going blind. He stood with his head unnaturally lifted and drawn back, like a watchful ghost. Mickelsson had seen him—it was almost as if he’d been expecting him—the minute he stepped out from under the eaves of the woods above the house: erect, wide-shouldered, angular and unstooped, no fat on him anywhere, though he was not a man with muscles of iron either, Mickelsson had observed as the man drew near. When he reached out to shake Mickelsson’s hand, the old man, John Pearson, held his hand horizontal, palm down, like a country politician. It was a style of handshaking Mickelsson hadn’t seen in years, not since boyhood, and with part of his mind he thought about it as he turned his own hand palm up, as if in submission, to take the old man’s. Pearson had a shotgun on his left arm, and at his side a mongrel dog sat grinning, black and rather small, not a hunter, part collie; that and a few sheep were the only animals he kept anymore, he said. He’d once had cows and a team of horses, but his wife had been poorly, the past two years, and had spent a lot of time at the hospital down in Scranton. (He spoke of it with seeming disapproval, annoyance.) With the dairy it had been hard to get down there to see her, and anyway, these days a herd the size he’d been able to manage, up there among the pines and boulders, had been not worth the keep. He grew a few vegetables, hunted a little, sold firewood—he’d sold to the doctor. Maybe the professor would need some, he suggested, one eyebrow raised. The reason he’d dropped by this morning, he said, was to find out if Mickelsson minded if he shot a few squirrels now and then, up in the wooded stretch between their two properties. “Why, I guess that would be all right,” Mickelsson said. From the way the old man nodded and pulled back his angular mouth for a grin, it was clear that the question had been just a formality; whatever answer Mickelsson had given him, Pearson would have done as he pleased.
Though it seemed they had nothing more to say, the old man went on standing there, looking at Mickelsson as if he, Mickelsson, were the visitor, and the reason for the visit had not yet come clear. Mickelsson waited, impatient to get back inside to his unpacking, resisting the temptation to ask some question or volunteer information about his life and work, as the old man was apparently hoping he’d do. He felt the awkwardness of the silence growing, and though he was nearly as tall as Pearson and a good deal heavier, he felt increasingly like a young man under suspicion, an intruder. Then, abruptly, not from embarrassment, it seemed to Mickelsson, but simply because he’d decided to do so—Pearson turned his head and looked over at the large, sharply gabled farmhouse. “Seen any sign of them ghosts yet?”
It did not seem intended as country humor, much less a cruel reference to Mickelsson’s bouts with illness. Anyway, there was no way the man could know. Pearson’s eyes, swinging back to judge Mickelsson’s reaction, showed no sign of teasing—no sign of anything, not even much interest.
“There are supposed to be ghosts?” Mickelsson asked after an instant.
“That’s what folks say. They never told you that?”
Mickelsson fished his pipe out of his coatpocket and turned to look at the house. Poking tobacco into the bowl, he said, “No, they didn’t mention it.”
The old man nodded, eyebrows drawn outward, ends lifted. Though he did not say so, he seemed of the opinion Mickelsson himself was now privately entertaining, that they’d kept the matter secret for fear that if they let out the truth Mickelsson might not buy. Pearson said, his head tilted like a dangerous bird’s, “Old brother and sister use to live here, years ago. Odd pair. I remember seeing them a time or two, when I was a boy.” He hung his right hand from the bib-strap of his overalls. “Sprague was their name. The brother and sister looked exactly alike, except the man wore a beard and the woman wore long dark dresses. Killed theirselves, or that’s what folks say. Or one killed the other and then was hanged.”
“Anyone know why?” Mickelsson asked. He lit the pipe, for a moment sending out smoke-puffs one after another, like an engine. Pearson looked at the smoke with interest.
At last he said, “I suppose it’s easy enough to speculate.” Though he did not go on to speculate, it was somehow clear what his own idea would be: strange goings-on behind those high, harsh windows—incest, most likely; at any rate something that had made them outcasts, no one to turn to in time of trouble. Mickelsson allowed his mind to toy for an instant with the queer idea that he could see someone standing at the upstairs south-east window. Secretly he knew from the beginning that it was only a reflection of the maple in the yard.
“Well, life has strange twists and turns,” he said.
Pearson glanced at him as if he thought it an odd thing to say. Then, with his tongue in the corner of his mouth, still keeping his opinions to himself, he looked over at the dog. “I guess we better get back,” he said. The dog threw a look at the woods, then up at his master. “Any time you need somethin,” Pearson said, “you just phone me, hay? Number’s in the book. John Pearson. I got a pickup truck, might help you clear all this owt.” He flapped his right arm in the direction of the junk outside Mickelsson’s back door—cardboard boxes and trash from the basement.
“I may take you up on that,” Mickelsson said.
Pearson turned away, the dog turning with him and trotting alongside him through the gray, knee-high weeds, moving like a dark leaf carried along on a stream. Only after they’d vanished into the woods did it occur to Mickelsson that he’d forgotten to ask who it was that was supposed to have seen the ghosts, and when, how often, how long ago. Not that it mattered. It was interesting, faintly—living in a house that was supposed to be haunted. Perhaps in fact som
e childish, irrational corner of his brain had hopes of seeing them. He imagined himself casually telling his colleagues at the university that he lived in a house where there were supposed to be ghosts, dropping it at Jessica Stark’s dinnertable, for instance. But though he was interested in the whole idea of ghosts, in a distant, rather academic way—casually interested in psychic investigation and what prescience might possibly imply about the freedom-determinism issue—interested, that is, as a professional philosopher and occasional reader of paperback books (My Passport Says Clairvoyant, An Experience of Phantoms, Physics and Psychic Research)—the idea that he himself might ever meet a ghost was, alas, unthinkable.
The image rose up in his mind of Pearson’s blurry, gray-blue eyes, his masklike, lurid face with its tuft of goat-beard. That he chose not to have much to do with people seemed evident. It was perhaps for that reason that one couldn’t tell whether or not he was joking, could no more know for sure what he was thinking than one could guess the opinions of a tree. He was a warning, Mickelsson thought, staring blankly, unconsciously poking at the ashy tobacco in his pipe. Karl Jaspers again; the idea that solitude in Nature may mean a temporary replenishment of selfhood, but to remain solitary is to risk impoverishment—to risk vanishing like a cloud dispersed, or sink like old man Pearson into the woods. His gloom deepened. Having fled to this house, he could not imagine finding his way back.
