John Gardner - Nickel Mountain

Callie’s hand was reaching once more toward Henry Soames’ wrist, but he ranted on, trying to tell the story to Willard Freund, but trying to tell it without details, without particular people, a story somebody’s father’s father had told — a story that, stripped of details, was absolute pointlessness. He stopped himself and, once more, caught Willard’s arm.

“I’m sorry, Willard,” he whispered frantically. “I’m a blubbering old man. I’m sorry.”

Callie cried, “Stop it, Henry. For God’s sake, please shut up!”

The room went silent. Henry felt the corners of his mouth twitching. The girl blanched as if nauseated, then turned on her heel and ran into the lean-to room behind the grill. She slammed the door behind her.

After a long moment, Willard held out a cigarette to Henry. Henry took it, his fingers trembling, and lighted it from Willard’s match. He listened to the hum of the electric clock. “I’m sorry,” he said again, calmly this time, so ashamed he couldn’t look at the boy.

Willard laughed — he-he-he — like a Negro. “Man, you do get carried away,” he said.

Again there was a silence between them, longer this time. Willard seemed on the point of speaking once, then shook his head and turned away to walk over to the window in front and look out at the highway. No sound came from the room behind the grill. At last Willard said, “Old man, I came here to tell you something.”

Henry waited, and Willard came over and leaned on the counter, his arms stiff, hands far apart. “I leave for school tomorrow,” he said. Then: “Ag School.”

Shame came again, mushrooming inside him as he realized that all his rant had been not only foolish but worse, unwanted. It surprised him that Willard had not told him sooner, and for a minute he was furious. But that passed. It wasn’t Willard’s fault, God knew. He asked feebly, “It’s settled, then?” He watched Willard’s eyes, but he found himself listening for a sound from the lean-to room behind.

Willard stared at his cigarette, then shrugged. “Guess it is,” he said. “I don’t really start till the summer session, but my old man swung this job for me, if I can start right now …”

“You told Callie?” Henry said.

“I mean to tell her tonight.”

“Will you need money?”

Willard blushed. Like father like son, Henry thought. A friend as close as Henry was ought to have a right, surely, to offer money. But he was more sorry for the boy than bitter. Like father like son, he thought again. A terrible shame. He jerked his head in the direction of the door into the lean-to room in back, and after a minute Willard went in.

Henry turned off the grill, though it was early, and gently scraped the grease into the trough, listening. He heard them talking quietly, and he could hardly stand the sadness of it, the doom of hope. It was a good thing to be old and past that, rolling steadily downward to the grave. In his mind he could see her clinging to him, crying maybe, and confused with the picture was another of her reaching, on tiptoe, for a plate on the top shelf, her head back and her breasts high. They might have done each other good, Callie and Willard. Good kids, he thought, half in sorrow, half in thanksgiving. Fine, fine kids. He laid the scraper down quietly on the tray beside the grill — his fingers were still trembling, he noticed — and he pulled on his brown wool sweater. His belly pinched behind the wheel, he drove out onto 98, heading south. In his rear-view mirror he saw the light in the back room go off. He felt a moment’s unrest, like a parent. But he said to himself then, Sensible. Now drunks wouldn’t interrupt their parting. Still, Henry was puzzled and a little frightened, though he could not admit what it was exactly that frightened him. He shifted to high.

By the time he reached Nickel Mountain he was calm. The air was clean here, with cool wisps of fog in the hollows. The brilliance of the night, the shocking perfection of the stars, the trees, the rocks, made dawn seem far away. As he curved above the river, he rode the brake gently, oppressed by an odd notion that he was somehow not on the usual road. Then came an even stranger idea, almost a conviction, the old fantasy with a new face. Somehow, emerging from a draught of winter wind, he found himself not little Fats and not Henry Soames but someone who had been cold and dead for a long time — his father, perhaps, or someone whose life Henry Soames had lived hundreds of years ago. He was making it up, of course, and he knew it; but he let himself believe it nevertheless, or let himself toy with it; and it grew on him. At the top of the mountain he parked the Ford and leaned back in his seat, waiting for the pleasure of the delusion to pass.

When he returned to the Stop-Off, Willard and Callie were gone. Henry undressed for bed and, without realizing he was doing it, snapped off the neon light. Catching himself an instant later, he turned the light on again, shaking his head. From his lean-to window he could see the fog wallowing down through the trees, stretching out thick, fleshless arms like the tentacles of some cavern beast, or like the white arms of a blind man. After a little more than an hour he pounded the dottle from his carved black pipe for the last time and lay down.

When Callie Wells came in, the following morning, Henry saw almost at once that she was as cheerful as ever — more cheerful than usual if anything. She talked of Willard as she always had, of what a fine driver he would be, of how clever he was, how kind, how terribly thoughtful. And so Henry saw that Willard had lied. He hadn’t told her and hadn’t intended to.

Henry said nothing.

The following day the cheerfulness was gone, and all the rest of the week was a grim business. The weather maybe. The wind had turned wintry, and for two days it snowed. Still neither of them said a word. On Monday she was in good spirits again, and it wasn’t long before she told him what he could easily have guessed, that she’d gotten a letter from Willard. His job was going fine. He’d be home toward the middle of August. He sent his best to Henry. She worked him out of things to do that week, finishing up every chore he gave her in half the time it should have taken and driving him pretty near to his wits’ end. She would hum to herself from morning to night, sometimes the same song hour after hour, and he thanked God he’d had the jukebox taken out three years ago.

And then, some while later — a month, maybe — another change came: She worked harder than ever, but not singing now, not laughing with truckers, never speaking except when she was spoken to; and finally it dawned on him that Callie was afraid she was pregnant. Her fear turned into near certainty — it was easy to see, though she still said nothing about it to him. She vacillated between stony silence and intense, nervous chatter, and she began to ask pointed questions about the Freunds. As for Henry, the suspicion that Callie was pregnant touched him deeply and gave her in his eyes a kind of holiness. He began to worry constantly that she would overdo or that she would fall. He began to walk, himself, like a man on ice.

June ended; haywagons stopped rolling by, and the farmers, up and down the road turned to cultivating corn. The pines took their richer summer color, and the maples and beeches were so full of leaves that the woods across from the Stop-Off were dark as an apple bin. July came, and farmers began to combine oats. The silence in which he and Callie worked had become a settled matter now, as if something they’d consciously agreed on. And yet, in spite of the silence, it seemed to Henry that he and the girl were closer than they had been before. Perhaps she guessed that he knew and shared her fear — surely she must have guessed — but if she did she did not tell him. He studied her eyes, her hands, her ankles, watching the signs, and at night he couldn’t sleep for worry and the pain in his chest. Because sleep came later and later, he began to oversleep sometimes. When he awakened, in the middle of the morning, he would find the door of his room closed and he would hear the clatter of dishes and the small-boy banter of truckers in the diner. When he went in to help her, Callie would snap, “You need your rest, Henry,” and would turn away, too busy to waste more words. Tears would smart in his eyes. He would insist — these days, it seemed to him, Callie ought hardly to lift a napkin — and she would give in without ever asking the obvious question, Why are you doing this? She’d begun to show a little now, and those who watched their comedy — his solicitude, her indignation — drew the obvious conclusions (but this neither one of them would know until later). At night, just before she left, she would come to his room to dust or straighten his chairs, irritably, then stand near the table in the middle of the room, sharing his dull, trivial thoughts, wondering with him, but wordlessly, whether or not the rain would come or, after it came, whether it would stop in time. Henry, alone with her in his room, learned to hug his arms to his sides as though the slightest movement might drive away a mist that protected them both, covered, on his side, sagging flesh, lumbering absurdities of soul, and covered, on her side — well, nothing, of course. Youth. Unhappiness. Her stony Baptist guilt and, maybe, terror.