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 p
oison 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.”
Mickelsson studied the old man’s face carefully, with admiration. It might have been carved out of gray mountain stone. “You don’t think somebody should check on ’em now and then?”
“Not me. He’d blow my head off. You go check on him, you want to.”
Mickelsson smiled. “Strangest country I ever lived in,” he said.
“Still wild, that’s the thing of it,” the old man said. “Still half Indian. Over to Mont-rose now, that’s civilized. All them big white houses, big old Bible school, picture show downtown, three different restaurants to feed the rich people. Ain’t even gaht rattlesnakes, over there in Mont-rose. All stayed this side of the river, away from the hymn-singing. Myself now, I’d sooner take the snakes.”
“Yes, that’s it, that’s the feeling,” Mickelsson said thoughtfully. “Sort of pagan. I don’t mean bad.”
“All those Catholics—worst pagans the world ever saw—that’s Seskehenna. All their patron saints and their spirits for every gorge and crick.” Though he did not smile, he was enjoying himself. “You can bet there’s no ghosts over there in Mont-rose. They sail right up to the Throne like chickens in a whirlwind.”
Now both of them smiled.
Pearson raised his long left arm and pointed down at the band of river and dark, gleaming patches of pond in the valley. “People of a well-watered land,” he said, “that’s what the name means. The Seskehenna. Captain John Smith come and called them that, and the Indians didn’t want to offend him, so they took it as their name.” He lowered his arm.
They both sat looking for a minute or two, the sun through the falling snow blindingly bright where it hit an open slope, everything dark and shifting where the shadows were.
“Wal, good luck to you,” Pearson said at last, and glanced at Mickelsson’s boots as if they might not be adequate.
“Same to you,” Mickelsson said.
The old man touched the brim of his cap, then stood up and turned without a word and set off through the woods with gradually lengthening strides. The shadows, as he moved toward them, seemed to deepen. Mickelsson shaded his eyes and looked up in the direction of Spragues’ place, but he could see no sign of it. He would remember distinctly, the following morning, that he’d wondered that instant if it were possible that the house had burned down. It had not, at the time the thought occurred to him; but it had by the following morning.
As soon as he stepped out the back door to get wood for his stove, he saw the smoke. By the time he reached the telephone, or anyway before he’d mentally committed himself to dialing, the trucks of the Volunteer Fire Department were already screaming by. He stood with his hands on his head, agonizing over whether or not he dared show his face. He had no idea why, abruptly, he decided he would. Quickly he put on a heavy sweater, coat, boots, and gloves and ran out to the car; but when he finally got it started and made his way up to where the fire was, it was obvious that there was nothing to be done. Everything was gone, even the shed where the dogs had been. The air was rank with the stench of wet, burned wood. The firetrucks were mud-spattered and serious, like old farm tractors. Mickelsson stayed back by the road, his hands in his coatpockets. He couldn’t tell whether the knot in his stomach was hunger or something else. Pearson stood nearby, talking with the man from the place between, John Dudak. Dudak was young, good-looking, cleanshaven. He had two boys with him, maybe eight and ten; he’d made them wait in the pickup.
“You think they were in there?” Mickelsson heard Dudak ask.
“Musta been,” Pearson said. His face was gray.
Smoke and steam rolled up through the bare-branched trees. All the ground was black.
With a start, Mickelsson realized that one of the men in the fireman’s outfits was Owen Thomas, from the store. Owen was coming toward him; it was too late to flee.
“Any sign of them?” Mickelsson asked.
Owen looked at him, reserved, then shook his head.
Perhaps it was Owen Thomas’s look, or the stark reality of the fire, or perhaps it was his painfully sharp memory of going there with Jessie: it came to him that he could tolerate his uncertainty no longer.
So far as he could learn from the telephone book, Susquehanna had no police station, though he knew it had police. Carefully and slowly, like an old man, he drove down to town and parked across from the Acme Market, four spaces ahead of where Tacky Tinklepaugh sat watching for violators of the town’s one red light. Mickelsson, wearing his most formal clothes—dark suit, dark overcoat—stepped carefully out onto the glare-ice street, locked his car-door, for no reason, then walked carefully on the glare-ice sidewalk back to the patrol car. He towered above it. He bent down and knocked on the passenger-side door and, when Tinklepaugh reached over and cracked it an inch or two, called in, “Can I talk to you a minute?”
By a gesture, Tinklepaugh invited him in, and, after glancing up and down the street, Mickelsson opened the patrol-car door and took a seat beside Tinklepaugh. Mickelsson sat hunched forward, staring up-from-under through the windshield. He pretended not to notice the whiskey bottle on the seat between them, though Tinklepaugh obviously had no interest in whether he noticed it or not. Tinklepaugh, it was said, had more than once pushed a car he owned over a cliff for the insurance, had once shot a man for no good reason at the Peaceful Valley Inn, and had again and again been given warnings about his drinking while on duty. None of that bothered him in the least, apparently. Without back-up he would knock on the door of well-known mountain murderers; at fires and cave-ins and drowning scenes he performed acts of heroism no sober man would dare, especially at the salary the town afforded him, ten thousand a year.
“Cold out,” Tinklepaugh said, and reached to the dashboard to fiddle with the lever that ran the heater.
Mickelsson studied him a moment, chilled by his miscalculation in coming here. He cast about in vain for a way to get out of what he’d gotten himself into. Tinklepaugh’s nose was enlarged, his face a drunken ruin, puffy, dark with broken blood vessels. His eyes were like partly closed suitcases.
“I want to ask you something,” Mickelsson said. “I’ve been worried sick, and I live out there all alone, you know—I’m a nervous person anyway …” Quickly, lest he change his mind, or chatter crazily and give himself away, he said, “You know that fat man that was murdered?”
Tinklepaugh nodded, a slow downward then upward movement of the fleshy mask and cowboy h
at.
“What have you found out?” Mickelsson asked.
Tinklepaugh seemed to study him, possibly too drunk to think clearly. At last he said, “Could be just about anybody, Professor Mickelsson.”
“That’s not very reassuring, is it,” Mickelsson said. “Are you saying you’ve got no idea at all? It could be me, or Owen Thomas, or the man that runs the Acme … or Charley Snyder?”
“Not them last three,” Tinklepaugh said.
A wave of fear went through Mickelsson. He’d set that one up himself! “You’re saying it could’ve been me?” His mind raced; then, cunningly, he said. “You’re right, of course. It could’ve been me. That would be convenient, pinning it on a newcomer—a stranger.”
“Yes, it would.” He was silent a moment, his bleary eyes on Mickelsson. “I’d have my problems, though. Say it’s you, you’re the killer.” He pointed at Mickelsson’s jaw. “You must be pretty well-off, if you killed that fat man. I’m surprised you don’t try to spend it. I understand you’ve been bouncing checks all over town.”
Mickelsson’s heart missed a beat. “Rich?”
Tinklepaugh’s face was as expressionless as ever, sagging with sorrow or neurotic gloom, drunken ruin. “I understand you’re into the I.R.S. for quite a handy sum. Funny you don’t pay ’em.”
Mickelsson said, “I don’t follow you.”
It came to him that Tinklepaugh had been holding his breath, or perhaps had forgotten to breathe, because now the man sighed, a sigh irrelevant to Mickelsson’s guilt or innocence. Tinklepaugh turned his face away—pulled it away reluctantly, it seemed—and stared out through the windshield, his hands on the steeringwheel. “You know those Susan B. Anthony dahllars?” he asked. “You know why they made ’em? Because paper dahllars wear out in a year or two, and they’re expensive to make. You see? Nothing’s what it looks. You’re like the rest of the citizens. You thought they made the Susan B. Anthonys as a sign of their new respect for women, or maybe because some faggot at the mint had been to England and got taken by the idea of coins with flat sides. Well, no. Maybe some of that—politics is always tricky. But mainly, dahllar bills wear out, they’re money down the drain.” He turned to Mickelsson again to study him, or rather, dully stare at him, as one might stare at a wall. “Every year’s dahllar bills are a little bit different—you aware of that? It’s like motorcycles or cars, small changes every year. Anyone deals with money all the time, such as a banker, he can tell at a glance if a bill is a seventy-nine or an eighty. Imagine how surprised he’d be if he suddenly got a handful of bills from, say, nineteen sixty-five. That’s when the fat man you murdered robbed the Cass Bank in St. Louis.”