Nickel Mountain (24 page)

It came to him that she wouldn't have taken Jimmy with her. No doubt he'd be in the garden with Simon, if Simon hadn't left yet, but he'd better go make sure. He went down the steps and around the corner of the house. Simon was asleep on the bench, and he was alone. Henry went back into the house and through the downstairs rooms, calling. He called up the stairs, but there was still no answer. He went up the stairs, pulling himself up on the railing and puffing like an old woman. He'd just reached the top when Jimmy screamed. Henry's heart banged in his chest as if to split it. When he got to the door and looked in, Jimmy was crouching on the floor by his crib, clinging to the railing and staring into the shadows in the corner of the room.

“What's the matter?” Henry roared.

“It's the devil!” Jimmy screamed, coming across to him now on all fours, as if he'd forgotten how to run, “Daddy! Daddy!
It's the devil!”

And then Simon Bale was standing there too, behind him in the hallway, panting from his sprint from where he'd heard the screams in the garden. When he saw Henry's face he went back two steps, smiling as if in horror, ducking his head quickly down and to the left and whispering, “Forgive—”

“You!” Henry yelled, and it came out as much like awe as like rage. His rage came slowly—or so it seemed to Henry's suddenly racing mind—but when it hit it was like a mountain falling. He might have killed him if he could have done it (so Henry Soames would say later, dead calm, at the coroner's inquiry), but he couldn't even hit him because he was holding Jimmy in his arms; he could only advance on him, howling in his fury, feeling his neck puffing up and throbbing. The room around him was red and his lips felt thick. Simon was whispering, “Forgive, forgive,” again and again and smiling as if his brain had stopped running (which perhaps it had, recalling like motionless, final judgments when Time was over and what was was—pictures standing out from the newsprint around them—his son Bradley Bale with a sign niggers and something more that was out of sight, his daughter Sarah looking out with a thousand centuries of icy, prophetic eyes) and suddenly he turned and bolted toward the stairs. Henry shrieked, driving, as the man reached the top. He did not seem to step down but to leap, looking over his shoulder with a fierce grin, as though he thought he could fly, and Henry rushed toward him in alarm and hate or was rushing toward him already by that time. (He would wonder later which came first, the scene rising up in his mind undiminished; and he would wring his hands). He saw him hit halfway down and tumble and fly out in all directions, reaching. At the bottom he lay still a minute, upside down, his arms flung out and one knee bent, the light from the kitchen door like a halo on his murderous face, and then his body jerked, and quickly Henry turned his back so that Jimmy wouldn't see.

He sat on the toybox in the child's room, holding him, shaking his head and groaning, seeing it again and knowing Simon was still lying there staring toward heaven, waiting. It began to get dark—he could feel the mountains closing in. He wished Callie would come home and tell him what to do.

VI

NIMROD'S TOWER

1

After the death of Simon Bale, Henry Soames took a turn for the worse. Doc Cathey said, wiping his forehead with the sleeve of his suitcoat, wholeheartedly meaning every word of it, at least for that moment (in the muggy, baking heat of August more impatient than ever with the mere humanity that always finally eluded his craft), “The hell with you.”

Now, perhaps partly because of the heat—weather unheard of in the Catskills, a sure sign of witchcraft at work, or miracles brooding—the nervous eating that had troubled Henry Soames all his life slipped out of control, became a mindless external power against which it was impossible for him even to struggle, a consuming passion in the old sense, a devil (but blind, indifferent as a spider) in his guts. When he talked with customers in the diner he seemed on the surface as cheerful as ever; too cheerful, if anything, shouting over the drone of the fans in that high, thin voice of his like a goat's, banging the counter-top, whinnying with laughter; and he seemed at least relatively cheerful, considering, when he drove out on still, hot Sunday afternoons to look at the hills, the green-brown river, the corn going yellow for want of rain. He'd sit sweating behind the steering wheel, pulled over beside the triangular white concrete posts at the edge of the highway, looking down at the valley that gasped away toward brown-blue mountains as if he owned it, for what it was worth, owned all the Catskills as far as the eye could see. Because of his fat he sat tipped back like a medieval baron, and he surveyed the world over his heavy shoulder as if with imperatorial disdain. Sometimes if the heat was unusually bad he would get out of the car and open the door for his wife and child—the dog would be back at the house, asleep—and lead them over to the shade of a pine grove. They were fair-skinned, Callie and the boy, and the heat made both of them nauseous and light-headed. Henry would lower himself onto a large, dusty surface root (the grass beside it bristly brown) and would fan himself with his hat. His hair was dark with sweat where the hat had been, and the folds of his neck were gritty. At last he would say like a king pronouncing judgment, “Hot.” Both his son and his wife would nod, solemn. The pine needles over their heads were whitish from the heat and drought. But wherever he walked or stood or lay, Henry Soames had food with him, and he ate. He ate steadily, calmly, his small teeth grinding on and on, like Time setting out to fill all the void with Space.

(“Like an elephant,” Old Man Judkins said, with more insight than any of them guessed, though even in his own mind the idea was obscure. He was thinking, vaguely, being old and tired, of the time he'd stood for an hour-and-a-half at the Coliseum in Buffalo—that sick-sweet chemical stench in the air—looking through the bars at a gigantic lean old African bull whose left hind leg was chained to the floor: he would lift the leg a little and find the chain still there, and he would be—as it seemed to Old Man Judkins, who knew about elephants only what he saw—so enraged that he couldn't even trumpet, could merely set down his foot again and stand there hopeless, like an Indian waiting to die. After an hour or more of this he'd begun to walk around and around in a circle, sideways, each step a great, slow shifting of unspeakable weight. Old Man Judkins thought of Henry Soames' father walking by the roadside, enormous and placid as a saint, singing in his reedy voice,
Every time it rains it rains … pennies from heaven.
“Terrible,” Old Man Judkins said, but no one paid attention.)

Henry Soames' wife would say, more cross than usual, in this weather, “What's the
matter
with you, Henry?”

“I'm sorry,” he would say, and he would seem to mean it, rolling his eyes up toward her; but he would go on eating, taking it in like a combine, or like a cutting-box, or a silo. She watched the weight he had lost coming back, pound by pound. He began to need his little white pills more often; he seemed to her to eat them like candy. It was not frightening to her but acutely annoying, one more irritation among a thousand—the movement of clothes on chafing skin, the piercing pinpricks of the bell on the diner door in front, the dust that lay over everything, no matter what you did to get rid of it—on the piano keys, on every flange of the old carved picture frames on the walls, on the soup cans and tops of boxes in the diner. One night she exploded, “Henry, you act like a
crazy
person.” As the words came out (she had said them many times before), she saw the truth. It was no matter of locked attics, burning churches, ice-cold hands around one's throat—the kinds of madness she'd heard stories about and seen in movies at Athensville. That kind of madness she hardly believed in, accepted merely as she accepted technicolor movies of, say, San Francisco; but this was real, not a matter of poetry but a study for her country rules—the rules that a child should have a father, that a wife should have a husband, and that a man trying to kill himself should be stopped.

She must act, she saw (wearily and angrily, flushed and spent, past all endurance), but how she must act would not come clear. With a part of her mind she wished him dead, the whole world dead; the heat coming up to her from the grill and flooding out into the heat of the room made her want to break free into violence. And yet even now, though abstractly, now, she “loved” him, for lack of a better word. She could think about her love—still there, she knew perfectly well, but dormant, an emotion locked up, waiting for September—as she might think about a pain she'd felt long ago and would one day feel again. It was the most vital emotion she had ever felt, on one hand, but, on the other, an emotion partly revolting to her: She had not seen much sign of it in her mother and father; it was an emotion they shrank from, lashed out against as they might at something obscene. She understood. But Henry, like her cousin Bill, or like Cousin Mary Lou, had accepted that feeling, had in a way made it into his identity, hugging her in his great loose arms, womanishly patting some truck driver's shoulder, bending down to kiss the forehead of their child as he slept. He
was
obscene to her, to tell the truth. His whole gross being, the very possibility of his existence at the height of a weedy, rainless summer was obscene. When he stood at the kitchen door watching her with eyes like an infinitely gentle pig's, his face thrown forward, leaning against the warm (she imagined) edge of the door, he would smooth the paint with absentminded fingers; and sometimes he would turn his face and touch the wood with his lips, this, too, absentmindedly, trying the texture with his mouth as a child would, and Callie would look down, revolted. Once she had said, “Henry, you're
kissing
that door!” and he had looked ashamed. Instantly she'd thought she shouldn't have said it, though she wasn't sorry. She'd never caught him doing it again, and, almost below thought, in the dark of her mind, she'd been annoyed at her pettiness and his, for paying attention.

“Crazy,” she thought, coming suddenly awake, toying with the word's dull echo in her head, standing over the hissing grill and staring through the grill's blackness at the pitch-dark center of things. She thought of George Loomis, sitting alone in his unlighted, funereal old brick house on Crow Mountain, watching television in the kitchen, his eyes like a murderer's. Henry respected George, and George had a kind of sense: He could talk to Henry if anyone could, and George could do it without making them all feel like worms. She set her lips and, as though someone else had suggested it, she nodded.

And so George Loomis sat down grinning in the armchair facing the davenport late one night and stretched out his legs, his left hand over his belly, relaxed, the empty right sleeve pinned up to the shoulder of his shirt. He smelled of whiskey. It gave her a turn, but she said nothing. She thought of her father, the car parked down in the creek below the DL&W bridge where he'd pulled to sleep it off. When he brought in the smell of whiskey with him, her mother would sometimes cry. “You never think of anybody but yourself,” she would say, “that's truly all you think about.” And he would nod, scowling, not offended by what she said but outraged by the maudlin vulgarity of her saying anything at all. Once, long ago, he'd hit her. When Callie was little, she too would cry, and her father would wince, looking at her, and then he'd shut his eyes with disgust and sit down and cover his face with his hands and wait for them to go. His verdict was right, she knew, and she knew that all women were evil. When they were loading hay he would lift her in his arms, laughing, and would throw her up onto the load. She was terrified—the load was high and round, and she was sure she'd roll off on the other side from the force of his throw—yet she would wish he would do it again and again, hoist her up in his arms and laugh, looking at her face for just a second, and throw her up at the white clouds and the deep blue glodes between. Her mother would say, “She'll be hit by dry lightning up there, Frank Wells. You know what happened to Covert's boy.” “Crap,” he would say. He would lift his arms and say, “Ok, scout,” and Callie would half-slide half-jump and he would catch her. Her mother said someday he would break her leg, and Callie thought,
Evil, evil!
Once he had turned his back and let her fall. She was fourteen. He and the two hired men had laughed, leaning on their forks, showing their dark yellow teeth. That night she had run away, intending to drown herself, but beside the creek—Prince running up and down joyfully, yipping at shadows—she'd found herself too cowardly and base for even that; there was no hope left for her but forgiveness. It was the troopers that had found her, and when she got home her father was asleep in his chair, snoring like a horse.

George Loomis said, “How things going, boy?”

“Oh, so-so,” Henry said.

Still no relief from the heat had come. Her head ached, and their voices sounded hollow, like voices in a dream.

George Loomis looked down for perhaps a minute, then cleared his throat and looked over at little Jimmy, playing with a truck on the davenport arm. George's hair was going prematurely gray, but across from Henry he looked like a high school boy. He had a boy's face, a boy's way of sitting—except for the one boot locked rigid in its iron brace. He had a look of innocence like a boy's, too, vaguely associated in Callie's mind with virginity.

“Sure dry,” George said.

Henry nodded. “Things burning right up.” His voice was mechanical, like his words. Even his eating looked mechanical, and George was doing nothing to help.

Callie looked toward heaven in despair.

(The Preacher would come to see Callie's father and would go out to the barn where he was milking, and Callie would go with him to show him the way. He'd step gingerly, behind the cows, worrying about getting manure on his pointed black shoes—good honest shit, her father called it and when her father saw him he would nod politely. In front of her mother, her father would mock religious people, but he was always polite to them otherwise. He was not a cruel man—she had learned that only lately, from Henry, or rather had only lately discovered by way of Henry that that was what she'd always known. He too was like a boy, her father—in a different way from George Loomis, though. Her father was easygoing, open, free with his money, a storyteller people would listen to for hours. He didn't believe or disbelieve in God, he said; he just didn't like churches. He didn't like hearing what he had to believe and what he mustn't believe—the very word
believe
made him curl his lip as he would when he listened to tear-jerking poetry or talk about flowers or songs about faraway places—and above all, he said, he didn't like grown men standing up and confessing in front of everybody, like drunks or like young lovers. But that was not what he said to the Preacher. He said, “Evening, Reverend,” and nodded, and when the Preacher talked about what a fine herd of cows he had (it had chronic mastitis and there wasn't a cow in the barn that gave more than a gallon) he would agree. Rightly, Henry said. (That too she had always known but had realized only when he said it.) If you told the Preacher the truth he would soon have control of you, would milk you dry. The Preacher would say, “We've missed you lately in church, Frank,” and her father would say only, “I haven't been going very regular, that's true.” He hadn't darkened those doors in fifteen years. The Preacher would talk to him sadly, man to man, high-tone Biblical language that embarrassed Callie, and after her father had heard him out he'd look thoughtful and say, “There's a lot to what you say, Reverend.” She would want to laugh, and only later had she come to see that she'd wanted to laugh with fury. There was something vile in her father's arrogant detachment. She wondered what her father would say if someone smarter than he was had come to talk about religion to him. Henry's father, for instance, when he was alive, who'd read hundreds and hundreds of books. But she knew what her father would have done, of course. How could even arguments have touched him?)