Mickelsson's Ghosts (83 page)

When they'd come together, Pearson said, “Seen them ghosts yet?”

“They're down there,” Mickelsson said.

Pearson raised his eyebrows. “You've heard 'em, then?”

“More than that,” Mickelsson said.

“No foolin.” Pearson stretched back one side of his mouth. “Wal, I'll be damned.”

The man had dead squirrels tied to his belt. Mickelsson pointed at them with his gloved left hand. “You've had some luck, I see.”

“Nothing fancy,” the old man said, then leaned over and spit. He looked around past his shoulder at the fallen tree, then moved toward it and half sat, half leaned against it. Mickelsson joined him. Pearson said, “So you've seen 'em, hay?” He straightened his neck, working a crick out. In his eyebrows there were droplets of water, melted snow. The dog remembered something and ran off into the brush.

“You thought it was just stories?” Mickelsson asked.

“I might've,” the old man admitted, and nodded, one quick jerk. “I can't say's I more'n half believed it, all in all.”

Mickelsson looked over where the dog had disappeared. “I wouldn't lie to you,” he said.

Pearson almost grinned, just a momentary tuck at the corners of his mouth. “I don't s'pose it matters much, one way t'other.”

“No, that's true. Be a funny thing to lie about, though.” He met Pearson's eyes.

“Oh, I don't know. Naht really. World can be a mighty dull place, time to time. I guess that's why people go around whistling, or writing verses on bathroom walls.” He continued to meet Mickelsson's eyes. “I'm not a whistler, myself, or a wall-writer. Other hand, I've seen that the world's gaht a certain amount of strangeness to it. Ball lightning, now. People can swear till they're blue in the face that it don't exist, but I've seen what I've seen.”

“I guess ball lightning's accepted now. By scientists, that is.”

“That may be, I wouldn't know. Used to be people'd just wave their hand at you. You know you can see ball lightning right through the floorboards? I don't mean the cracks, I mean right through the floor. I'll tell you something stranger. When my dad was a boy, there was a woman was dying—old woman named Radwell, she'd been normal all her life—she'd point at the wall and yell owt, ‘Look!'—scared to death—and right where she'd been lookin the wallpaper'd catch fire. My dad saw it himself. Swore to't.”

Uncomfortably, Mickelsson nodded.

“Wal,” the old man said, looking off into the air, “I'm not surprised abowt the ghosts. There's times when I believe I've seen ghosts myself, just as plain as day—and then again there's times when I'm not sure I wa'n't fooled. I guess that sounds peculiar, don't it.” He watched Mickelsson with level eyes. “Ye'd think at least a man would know what he seen from what he ain't seen.”

“You're sure you saw the ball lightning, though.”

“Whole bunch of us that time. Cyrus Tyler, Arthur Cole, Omar Bannatyne, Hobby Jayne—he used to be the local auctioneer, mainly cattle. … Everybody saw it. I'll tell you a fact. It's more common for a whole group to see things than for one man alone. Like the night of the Baker murders, in 1918. My whole family felt it happenin, just as clear as anything, though the Baker place was two miles away. We was sitting on the porch, all nine of us, and the strangest feeling you can imagine come over us. We all remarked on it. One man by himself—except for certain sort of
strange
men—it don't come through near as well. That's my opinion.”

Mickelsson looked down, remembering his student Alan Blassenheim's tentative gropings for some connection between intersubjectivity and truth. Pearson was arguing something more than that. Mickelsson slowly turned his bull-neck to gaze across the valley. “I know what happened down there,” he said. Though he spoke with assurance, he was seeing if he believed it. He was thinking of that trick of his grandfather's, asking a question and proposing an answer, seeing if the hunch came that told him it was true.

Pearson said nothing, waiting.

“Caleb and Theodosia Sprague had a child,” Mickelsson said. “They kept it hidden from the world—name was David, I think. The child died. Somehow it must've been Caleb's fault, or anyway Theodosia believed it was.” He mused a moment, recalling something else. “Caleb wouldn't take the boy to a doctor, thought he could somehow manage it on his own. After the child died, the woman brooded on it. Years and years later, when her brother was up on the roof cleaning the chimney, she shot him.” He looked at Pearson for some sign that it was so or not so.

After a long moment Pearson shook his head. “It's a strange story,” he said.

“That's not what happened, then?”

“Who knows? Way I heard it they found him cut to pieces, stuffed down in the privy.”

The hunch Mickelsson had been hoping for hadn't come. He got out his pipe and tobacco pouch and fingered tobacco into the bowl. “I dreamed all that,” he said. “Maybe that's all it was, a dream.” Then, after a moment: “I had another dream, one time—a sort of a dream. I saw where they buried the boy.”

Pearson went on gazing into the air. “We could look sometime, come spring.”

“Maybe we should.”

“Mebby so.”

Mickelsson said, “You mentioned one time that you can dowse and find bodies.”

Pearson smiled and turned to look with fascination at Mickelsson's pipe. “Wal,” he said, “I've been known to say a laht of things.”

“You can't do it, then?” Mickelsson asked.

Pearson went on smiling but looked away. He seemed to hunt for where his dog had gone. After a while he said, “That house has seen a good deal, I guess. They say it belonged to Joseph Smith for a while, long time ago.”

“I didn't know that!”

“Must not've looked over the title search when you bought it, then—unless the stories ain't true. I 'magine they are, though. Anyway, most people think they are. He was a strange man, that Smith. Hahrd to say if he was crazy or the cleverest man of his time—or both.”

Mickelsson held a match to his pipe, not glancing at Pearson lest he put him off his story.

Pearson said, “Gaht a laht of it from his father, Joseph Sr., people say. There's books about it—
History of Susquehanna County,
for one. Not very favorable to the Mormons. Joseph Sr. was a dowser and well-digger, but a laht of his time he spent hunting for buried treasure. Even to this day there's supposed to be overgrown pits here and there that are supposed to be the remains of Joseph Sr.'s excavations.” When Mickelsson glanced at him, Pearson was smiling, wryly, enjoying himself. “The Prophet was something of a ne'er-do-well, just like his dad, at least that's what people thought 'round here. There's various descriptions of him in the books. I remember one I read one time—”

Mickelsson saw in his mind's eye an image of Pearson he wouldn't have guessed, the old man bent over a book at his kitchen table, or maybe in his Iivingroom, under a goose-necked floorlamp, thoughtfully reading, a country scholar passing a long winter's night, his wife perhaps not far away, sewing, the old man's finger moving under the words.

He was saying, “… torn and patched trousers held up by suspenders made of sheeting, calico shirt as dirty and black as new-plowed ground, uncombed hair sticking up through the holes in his old battered hat. But of course there was a good deal more to him. Maybe he wasn't too educated, but he was a talker, clever as a crow. Sometimes when Smith would get worked up a kind of light come from his head, so people say. He was a first-rate crystal-ball gazer when he was no more'n a boy, and he got himself quite a reputation for finding lost objects and buried treasure. One time up in Bainbridge, New York, he hired himself out to some old fahrmer to find a lost Spanish silver mine, and by gol the thing was there, though not long afterward Smith was in court about it, admitting to fraud. He'd bless fields and make the crops come in strong, they say. One time he went owt to bless some fahrmer's field, and he dropped his magic stone into his top-hat and went through his rigmarole, and that night there was a frost and the only field ruined was the one Joseph Jr. had blessed. The fahrmer was hopping mad and went to Smith to get his money back, and Smith made a big to-do abowt it—he made sure there was plenty of witnesses. Claimed he'd gotten mixed up and had cursed the field instead of blessing it—he was mighty sorry, a course—and he gave the poor man back his money. He was in and owt of court a hunnerd times, and everything he did seemed to make him more famous and respected, even though he was time after time fownd guilty.

“Wal, he was the right man born at the right time.” Pearson smiled to himself as if thinking what
he
might have been, given Smith's opportunities. “I don't remember the details, but it was a time of—what do they say—religious foment. The established churches was falling apart. The Baptists had just split into four different groups—Footwashers, Hardshell, Free Will, and something else—and around Palmyra, New York, where the Smiths lived, all kinds of new religions was shooting up. The Shakers was there, and the Campbellites, and some woman—I forget the name—called the ‘Universal Friend,' claimed she was Jesus Christ Hisself come back … and there was a man named Isaac Bullard, claimed he was Elijah. … It was a good time for a man like Joseph Smith Jr. I don't remember the whole story—Joseph Smith hisself would get confused about it, time to time. It had something to do with his mother, I b'lieve. Maybe he meant to play a joke on her, though he must've suspected from the stahrt that the thing had possibilities. He gaht together with a man named—I think it was—Rigdon that had stole some novel by an ex-Presbyterian minister, called
The Manuscript Found,
and Smith and Rigdon mixed it in tagether with some Masonic foolishness, after Smith gaht in with that—you have to admire the
labor
of it all. …”

Pearson broke off, ruefully shaking his head. “Wal,” he said, a kind of sigh, “the thing took off. You gotta remember what times those were, back there in the early-to-middle eighteen-hundreds; bunkum all over the place, and this pahrt of the country more than most places. That's when that famous poet over in England was dickerin to get himself a lahrge piece of land along the Seskehenna River to make a paradise of some kind, maybe a nudist colony, with opera and theater and communal labor and Lord knows what. Phineas T. Barnum was in his twenties then, puttin together his exotic anamals and freaks and ballyhoo, not to mention things more serious, like the ‘Swedish Nightingale.' Smith's story got fancier as people stahrted perkin up their ears. Seems that even before he gaht tried and convicted at Bainbridge he'd had a vision one night when he was prayin for forgiveness for his sins. Seems the great angel Moroni appeared to him and told him that one day Joseph Smith would be famous all over the world. He was gonna be showed a bible written twelve centuries earlier on golden plates and buried right here in the vicinity. He'd take it from its hiding place and translate it by means of two miraculous ‘stones' or spectacles, and so on, so on. By gol, people swallowed it hook, line, and sinker. It wasn't only the times he lived in, come right down to it. There's a picture of him—painting somebody did; I run acrost it in one of those books about him. Say what they like, he was a handsome man, if the painter didn't lie. Handsome as one of them people in the movies. And you read the letters he wrote—there's a lot of 'em reprinted in the book about his life—they're as handily phrased as anybody's letters, high-toned and elegant as Jefferson's. They're like the letters of Abraham Lincoln, but without the jokes.”

He fell silent, pursing his lips, staring at the ground. “I don't mean to say he was better'n people think. He was everything that man Jones was, with the People's Temple, except one thing. Back in behind all the craziness, Jones was sincere. Musta been. Sincere enough to die and take the whole temple with him. Joseph Smith was never that. He was a thief, con-man, libertine, murderer—organized a band of assassins called the Sons of Dan, killed any number of people, tried to kill the Governor of Missouri one time. You'd never catch Smith taking poison for his people!” He thought awhile; then; “The Mormons will tell you there never was any Sons of Dan, 's all ‘gentile propaganda,' or if there was there's certainly no Sons of Dan
these
days, they'll say. Don't you believe 'em. There was a whole army of 'em, Angels of Death from Indianapolis to Salt Lake City. I don't know about now.”

“Around
here,
you mean?” Mickelsson broke in.

“I gaht no evidence one way t'other, as to now.”

The night his house had been searched sprang to mind, and he told Pearson about that, watching the old man for any sign that he might know who had done it.

“Funny business,” Pearson said, squinting. “I s'pose it
could
be the Mormons, looking for something.” He seemed sorry now that he'd spoken of them.

“For what, though?” Mickelsson asked.

“Maybe they couldn't told you theirselves.”

Mickelsson looked at the tracks he'd made, coming here, and Pearson's tracks, intercepting his, and the tracks they'd made coming to lean on the fallen tree, then the tracks of the dog. There seemed nothing to conclude.

After they'd sat for a while in silence, Mickelsson asked, giving up on the other, “Seen any signs of life from your neighbor Sprague?”

“Every onct in a while there's smoke comes owt the chimley, and now'n again the dogs bark. I guess they're still in there.”

Absently, still thinking of other things, Mickelsson said, “It's a wonder they make it through the winter.”

“Sooner or later they won't, may happen. Gets all of us, in the end.”