George Mills

by Stanley Elkin

  Only Wickland was still Reverend.

  Of all the mystics, psychics, theosophists, astrologers, telepaths, palm readers, metapsychologists, diviners, fortune tellers, alchemists, necrophysicists, crystal gazers, and figure flingers in Cassadaga, only Wickland was Reverend. Nor did George believe any more in Wickland’s bona fides than he did in the spiritual and scientific ordainments of Cassadaga’s other metaphysicians. It was a simple matter of distancing.

  The town’s only child—nephew and grandson to all—he was in on their secrets, the tricks of their trade. Lessoned as a novitiate, closely drilled as an apprentice, often permitted to help with their proofreading, the pamphlets and handbooks they were endlessly writing, the psychic newsletters they were always getting out, he was their confidant, too. He read their mail to them, petitions of the mortally ill—the divines of Cassadaga were a forum of last resort: requests for clues to stave off death, appeals from widows, widowers—he learned that couples in their fifties and sixties and seventies still made love, ardent as teenagers; he learned, if not of the sanctity of marriage, at least of its addictive power, that love was always the last habit broken—to contact their dead.

  There were letters of inquiry:

  “Dear Professor M. R. R. Keller,

  “I am eighty-two years old and very infirm. I do not expect to live out the year. Indeed, I feel so bad now and everything is so hard for me that I don’t much want to. I am not a religious person, but I read your book about contact with the invisible world and I have followed your experiments and truly believe I have benefited from my experiences with discarnated Intelligences.

  “I am writing for information. My problem is this. Nowhere in your book are any rules set down on how to behave when I am dead. Is there an etiquette in such things? Will I still be desirable to Lionel? He was only fifty-six when he passed. Is it permissible for a woman my age to make the first move?

  “I suppose I shall find out soon enough, but if you could suggest what is expected in these matters it might help to avoid awkward and unnecessary embarrassment.”

  Keller’s answer was straightforward as the letter which prompted it.

  “Dear Mrs. Line,

  “I regret to say that my researches have not extended to the delicate areas in which you seek information. Might I suggest, however, that you consult some dear and trusted discarnated Intelligence directly and ask her?”

  The Cassadagans never put a price on these exchanges, though a few dollars almost always accompanied a letter of inquiry. When it didn’t the letter was answered anyway. George judged that most psychics were good for between twenty to thirty dollars a week from such correspondence, and though they made more by filling orders for the merchandise his father took into De Land, the merchandise remained the sideline, their psychic services the real business of their lives.

  He was permitted to handle the gazing crystals, the clear, flawless globes like temperate, neutral ice, so transparent he felt he held invisible weight. He looked through prisms, altering light as one might pull the strings on marionettes. And tried the Aurospecs, seeing other people as if they were on fire, their green and red and orange radiance exploding off them like gasses from the surface of a sun, their jeweled and kindled selves seething about their persons like rainbows boiling. And pressed his ear to the seance trumpet and heard the muted sharps and flats of invisible performance.

  But it was the letters which interested him most.

  “Dear Dr. N. M. M. Kinsley,

  “I have been a practitioner of the Kinsley Astral Projection Method for the past five years and have had dozens of successful expeditions. I have visited the homes of several relatives at distances in excess of two thousand miles, although I am still unable to get past the Rocky Mountains.

  “Always before, as your method proclaims, I have been most successful where need is greatest, when subliminal, subconscious Soul cries out to sensitized psychic Soul. These, as you well know, have not always been ‘pleasant’ experiences, the comfort I have been able to impart to a grieving cousin who has lost her young husband or a father temporarily separated from his son by the wall of death, being a fleeting, cold sort of comfort at best. I have tried, as you suggest in your superb tract, to bring them good will and the good news of immortality, but in their grief states I have noticed that they are not always, or even often, responsive. Indeed, since I am unable to take with me the departed’s actual astral imprint, I have sometimes come away feeling of no more real use to the family than the ordinary well-intentioned condolence caller from church with her cakes and casseroles. However helpless I may feel psychologically when even under the best of circumstances I am able to leave only my well-meaning spiritual calling cards, a gesture which, in terms of lasting benefits, I dismiss in the very act of writing the word ‘gesture,’ I find that I return to my bed after such dubious house calls, enervated, depleted, exhausted, and profoundly unhappy.

  “Here is the burden of my complaint. I am not by nature a Diabolist, no more than yourself. I have never subscribed to the old Manichean principle of the Good/Evil, Light/Dark, Heaven/Hell contrarieties. But now, well, I’m not so sure. It’s not that my belief has been shaken, but really rather the opposite——that my belief has undergone an enhancement. Now I believe everything. There are more things, Dr. Kinsley, than are dreamt of in your philosophy. And ‘dream,’ I think, is the operative word. Those I am privy to through my nocturnal visitations have been, are, depraved. My own grandmother, a religious and even naive woman who has never harmed anyone in all her ninety-one years, has dreams which may not even begin to be described by the word ‘randy.’ They are filth, Doctor, pornographic in the most debased sense of that term. Genitalia are undisguised, not Freudian obelisks or large bodies of water, not telephone poles or dark tunnels, but swollen cocks and moistened cunts, baby dolls with curling pubic hair about their slits—I am not being ‘frank’; if anything I am glossing out of decency—erections severed from their groins and glistening in their dewy juices. My relatives’ dreams, my cousins’ and in-laws’, are the very models of lust. Sodomies are become exponential, perpetrated on dead house pets, onanism and fellatio commonplace as scratching one’s back or getting a haircut. I shan’t recount the awful details. You can’t imagine them, and I won’t describe them, but if this is what is meant by ‘Negative Life Forces with their capacity to deflect the subject’s concentration from his loss,’ then I suggest that further studies be done, that your treatise be updated. If these were simply my own observations I would be willing to discredit them, dismiss them on the grounds of anomaly and insufficient evidence rather than question fundamental scientific principles established over a lifetime of good and careful work, but the experience of other adepts confirms my own. Practitioners here in Michigan have told me at our monthly meetings of salacities which I dare not write down lest I come into conflict with the rules governing the postal service. They dream, the grieving do, of excesses and improprieties unknown even in the lowest days of the Roman Empire, unknown to history’s heathens and pagans and barbarians, unknown, I daresay, even to the great perverts, the rippers and sexual surgeons, innocents all in depravity when compared to these lechers of the hearth.

  “I have an Uncle Joe in Vermont, a blacksmith by trade and, or so I would have thought, temperament, one of those red and black wool-shirted men who wear the checkerboard, who dress, I mean, like a game. A crony of a man, long underweared and gallused and wide leather belted too, one of the dark pantsed and wood stoved of earth who has the names and faces of his townsmen like a postmaster. A fisherman of a fellow, honest as a hunter, more loyal to the local woods and streams than to any nation, who has all the intricate weathers like a second language. A whittler of course, and volunteer fireman, a loresman of stone and all the materials of Nature, beech and maple, elm and ash, and all the secret, invisible grains of the human heart. Whose word is his bond——and he has many words, as comforting as honest. For children, for men with troubles and for sa
d ladies, for lame dogs and lamer ducks. You know the type, or if you’re lucky do, an unofficial mayor of a man, powerful of course, muscled I mean, with strength that comes as much from virtue and good will as from hammer or heat. His power great but never guarded, not held like a secret or watched like his fire, no caution catching it up or checking it in, not anything fearful. My uncle’s great strength, innocent as talent, like a good singing voice, or the gift of speed.

  “And no bachelor. Uncle Joe a family man, that organic guy. The sort of man—this didn’t happen—who might have married the sister-in-law when the sister died, who found the fit of love, I mean to say, who’d find it anywhere and count it as a wonder that his loved ones, all the folks he wanted most to be with in the world, his wife and children, nephews, sisters, nieces, brothers, should live so close to home, not even in the next valley but right there in the very town, beside him in the very section of the very church he prayed in, the very lake he swam in, the store he bought his staples.

  “He married Aunt Elizabeth when both were twenty-eight. They had four children, my cousins Redford and Oliver and Susan and Ben, and raised them, he and Elizabeth—I don’t mean strictly, I don’t mean by any theory, I don’t even mean good-naturedly—as naturally as Aunt Elizabeth might put up strawberries, following nothing more than the natural laws and time-honored processes of canning, first this, then that.

  “Elizabeth died when the youngest, Oliver, was still in his teens.

  “Fine young men, a lovely woman, whose only quarrel that I can now recall was who would get to stay with Joe. The smith profession is, of course, a languishing one, and while it was never a matter of who would make his way in the world, who would get to go off to the state university at Burlington—none would, none wanted to—but rather which would have to hire out, which would have to work the timber or the nearby farms or go to the factories where the money was, and which would remain—they wouldn’t have thought of it as behind—with the benevolent, godlike father they loved as much for his kindness and wisdom as for his paternity.

  “ ‘Mother’s dead,’ Susan told him. ‘You have no woman, Father, no one to cook your meals or mend and wash or sing for you. The trade is falling on hard times. You’re only fifty-two. You don’t yet even need our young strength to help you at the forge. Send them away, dear. Let me stay.’

  “Redford said, ‘I’m the oldest, Father. It’s the privilege of the oldest son—I don’t say “duty,” I say “privilege,” I could say “right”—to follow in his father’s footsteps, to help him in his profession. I don’t want to take it over, sir. For this I care nothing, though should you desire it I would stay at the forge till after the last horse in Vermont had died, and after that as well. I would repair tools, fit new disks, harrows, shape new heads to nails, fashioning your iron as you taught me, building the fire to 1,535 degrees Centigrade, puddling and shingling, adding your water like transfusion. Allow me to remain, Father. I ask in the name of primogeniture.’

  “ ‘I’m the youngest, Pa,’ said Oliver. ‘My boyhood isn’t finished yet. I lost a mother. I’m not ready, Daddy. Don’t send me off.’

  “And Ben reminded him he was neither oldest son nor youngest, not special at all, not even female like his sister, that nothing about his birth gave him the special prerogatives or claims the three others had lived with all their lives. It was only justice and fair play, qualities whose names he might not even know had he not learned about them, a mute listener, an undistinguished son and brother, in his father’s shop all his unexceptional life. It was only retroactive equity and redress he was seeking in asking to be allowed to stay with his father. It was only the presentation of a twenty-odd-year-old bill and quit-claim.

  “ ‘You can’t ask me,’ Joe told them—they had come separately to make their cases but he answered them together—‘to choose among my children. Your sexes and ages are of no importance. Years make no precedence in love. Biology has no claims on it. You shall have to decide among yourselves.’

  “It was only the next valley over, Dr. Kinsley, not the next state or county or even village. None was to be exiled, banished. It was understood that they could take their dinners together, not weekly, mind, but daily if they chose. Joe had built rooms onto his house as they were needed, had carpentered the beds and other furniture for each of his children, so that their living arrangements were not only adequate but actually lavish, the house as trim and ordered and ample to the needs of their bodies and imaginations as a child’s tree house. It was their sense of seemliness and honor that guided them, their knowledge that if they continued to live together as a family now that all but one of them was grown, it would be as a family that had somehow gone off, spoiled in some acute, vinegarish way.

  “That was when they quarreled. They did it where their father could not hear them, could not know of it. They had been told that they had to decide by themselves. Logic was useless. These were the claims of need and love. They soon saw that right had nothing to do with it, that each of their arguments was checked and canceled by the equally legitimate arguments of the others.

  “ ‘We’ll never convince each other,’ Ben said. ‘We’ll have to fight it out.’

  “Even Susan understood that Ben meant physically, that they would have to wrestle and punch for the right to stay with the wonderful old man. They were a blacksmith’s children, had the blacksmith bone and blacksmith muscle. Each had grown up by the forge, each taken his or her turn with the hammer at the anvil. Susan had played with iron as another child might play with sand. They had never quarreled, never fought. They had no idea who was strongest. They didn’t want to hurt each other and, at least in the beginning, each held back, withdrew not as an actual miser might actual money but like some old chivalrous soldier from the hoard of his strength and wile that measured, calibrated advantage he perceived as waste, brutality, overkill, unfair edge. Merely pushing and shoving at first, merely milling about in the baled field of their combat, not so much testing the power of his or her foes as on guard to arrest and counter any sudden thrust. They might have been confronting each other tentatively as so many strikers and scabs, police and demonstrators, so that Redford must have thought of Ben, ‘Why, he’s delicate,’ and Ben of Oliver with whatever of regret his nervousness permitted, ‘Poor frail Ollie, so attenuated finally in those work clothes. He should hire out, the outdoors will do him good,’ and Susan of herself, remembering the anvil she had once actually lifted off the ground just to see if she could do it, ‘Perhaps women are stronger than men, perhaps it’s virginity which gives us the advantage, perhaps all force is moral force.’

  “They feinted with each other for half an hour until it must have seemed even to themselves like some badly managed charade, even to country people who had never seen an actual prize fight in an actual ring, whose work was with the seasons, who levered Nature and Nature’s crops, more a shy and nebulous routine of courtship, or the obscure, oblique forms preparatory to hard bargaining and doing business, than anything they were really there for.

  “ ‘I’ve been fooling with you,’ Susan admitted suddenly, and knocked Redford down with what she did not even know was an uppercut. Ben jumped on her back and tried to ride her to the ground but Oliver grabbed him from behind and pulled him off.

  “The sister and brothers were startled by what had happened, amazed and ashamed by the sudden change that had come over them. Mutual protectors, they were mutual protectors still, but furious now, each rushing to the defense of the other, calculating punishment, doing the meticulous equations of violence and charging against the perpetrator the exact measure of the blow that had been struck. Susan, who had knocked Redford down with an uppercut, was knocked down by an uppercut by Ben. Oliver, who had pulled Ben’s head back while Susan carried him across the field, was himself grabbed about the neck by Redford and thrown to the ground. Susan leaped at Redford to avenge Oliver. They struggled this way for perhaps a quarter of an hour.

  “ ‘What we got here a
in’t no fight,’ Ben managed breathlessly. ‘What we got here is some antifight.’ It was so. All could see it was so.

  “ ‘We got to go all out, I guess,’ Oliver said, ‘or we’ll never fix who gets to stay with Pa.’

  “Possibly it was Oliver’s logic. More likely it was the invocation of their dear father that brought them round. In either event, there was a battle royal, a free-for-all which bore about as much relation to the first fifteen minutes of their conflict as the last quarter of a football game does to the pregame ceremonies——the marching bands and prancing mascots and flash cards and all the simple pictographs of loyalty.

  “In another twenty minutes it was over. Susan almost won. Their father had said that biology made no difference. To him, of course, it didn’t, but her daughter’s—you could have said woman’s—status and distancing had loaned her a strength and fierceness that was unavailable to the boys. They were fighting for the right to stay with their father. She was fighting for the right to remain with her father and also—if this isn’t misunderstood—with a man. But it wasn’t enough. She beat two of the brothers but lost out to the third.

  “Redford won the fight, though they still didn’t know who was the strongest. That was beside the point. Their father had said that years made no precedent in love and for that love-rounded man they didn’t, wouldn’t, but Redford was the oldest, had known him the longest, had one or two years more tenure in love, that much more priority and seniority and simple brutal rank with which and for which to fight.

  “So it seemed that logic and right had decided it after all, that strength flowed to the one who had the most to lose. Redford won, Susan placed, Oliver, whose boyhood wasn’t finished, showed, and Ben, undistinguished by placement or sex, came in dead last.