Nickel Mountain Read Online Free Page A

Henry would not trudge in his father’s footsteps. One job after another would cave in under his father, and she, who came from a fair-off family, lawyers mostly, would give him just barely enough of her money to set him up in the new project which, sure as day, would fail. He was as simple and harmless all his life as a great, fat girl. It was the floundering harmlessness, no doubt, that Henry’s mother had hated in him. And so she’d driven him to schoolteaching at last. Because, she had said, he’d been through high school and couldn’t do anything but read books. “You don’t need capital for teaching school. Maybe it’ll make a man of you,” she’d said. And so Henry’s father had suffered the final indignity, plopped sweating in front of people like Frank Wells, enduring their pranks as a woman would, with his own son in the classroom, and in between times teaching them multiplication and poetry and Scripture. Which explained why Henry’s mother’s name had not been put in the Bible under “Deaths.” It was hard to say why his grandmother’s name wasn’t there. Maybe his father’s womanishness had become, at last, a hatred of women in general, or at any rate a refusal to admit that they lived and died. His last delusion: that here at least, between the Old and New Testaments, a man stood on his own. (But Doc Cathey had said once, pushing his crooked knuckles down in his coat’s side pockets and shaking his head, “Solid as stone your daddy was. Solid as stone.”)
    He fitted his hands down beside his legs on the edge of the bed, feeling the power in his fingers. He leaned forward over his knees and pushed up slowly. He made his way to the window above the books.
    The cardboard windowpane was snug, this time. It wouldn’t let the water in no matter how bad the storm. He ran two fingers over the spine of the Bible.
    The ridges on the leather were dry and cracked, but queerly slippery like the petals of an old pressed flower. Inside, it was as though someone had ironed every page, scorching the paper a little and making it brittle. The two names, his grandfather’s and his grandfather’s father’s, had been scribbled in hastily and were almost unreadable. Henry frowned, not so much thinking as waiting for a thought to come. He laid the Bible down gently and went up front again for the ballpoint pen.
    When he’d written in the names, with all the dates he could remember, he half-closed the book, then paused and stood for perhaps two minutes staring at the gold on the edges of the pages. He racked his brains for what it was that had slipped his mind, that had come and vanished again in an instant as he wrote, but then, discovering nothing, he put the Bible back where it went and, after another pause, recrossed the room. Standing across the room from the bookshelf he could see the prints his hands left in the smooth skin of dust on the Bible’s cover.
    He lowered himself onto the bedside and closed his eyes for a moment. In his mind, or under his eyelids, he could still see the gold tooling on the Bible, and beyond it a pattern of crisscrossed distances. Slowly the lines seemed to form letters, a name in gold. He felt his forehead muscles tightening, and the nerves trembled in the back of his neck. But before he knew what it was he was dreaming, he was awake again, staring at the Bible as before, or almost as before: staring from a new point in time now, perhaps only minutes after the other, perhaps several hours.
    (What would he have missed if he’d died, that first time? Had anything happened? Anything at all?)
    While he slept, that night, old man Kuzitski’s light blue junk-truck wandered off the road, nudged through the guard rail, and rolled down a sixty-foot embankment. Everything burned but the door, which fell free and lay in a blackberry thicket (the branches still gray and limp this early in the spring),