Nickel Mountain Read Free Page A

Willard Freund. Willard was a swan.
    (Henry had sighed, helpless, sitting in the back room with Willard the night the boy had told him of his father’s plans. He’d felt old. He hadn’t stopped to think about it, the feeling of having outgrown time and space altogether, falling into the boundless, where all contradictions stood resolved. He had listened as if from infinitely far away, and it had come down to this: That night he had given up hope for Willard, had quit denying the inevitable doom that swallows up all young men’s schemes, and in the selfsame motion of the mind he had gone on hoping. For perhaps it was true that Willard Freund had everything it took to make a driver (Henry was not convinced of it, though even to himself he’d never pinned down his doubt with words; he knew only that the boy had a certain kind of nerve and a hunger to win and the notion—a notion that everyone on earth has, perhaps, at least for a while—that he was born unique, set apart from the rest), but even if it was true that he had what it took, there was no guarantee that he would keep it. Things happened as a boy got older. Speedy Cerota, the man who ran the jeep place down in Athensville, had been lightning once. He’d married a girl that drove in the ladies’ and they’d had three kids as quick as that, and one day Speedy had come in second—bad car, he said—and then fourth, then fifth, and pretty soon, without his ever knowing what had happened, it was over, he couldn’t pass a stoneboat. But as surely as Henry Soames knew that, he knew too that you never knew for sure until it happened. And even if you knew beforehand that what they wanted, the grandiose young, was stupid in the first place and impossible to get in the second, even then you had to back them. If it wasn’t for young people’s foolish hopes it would all have ended with Adam. Henry Soames thought: What could I say?
    He was too old for such hopes. Nevertheless, he had rubbed his palms on his legs, that night, brooding. A vague idea of taking his mother’s money out of the bank in Athens-ville for Willard had crossed his mind. It wasn’t doing anything there—molding and drawing interest for him, Henry, who wouldn’t pick it up with a gutter fork. It had never been his any more than it was his father’s. Hers. Let her climb up over her big glassy headstone and spend it. “Remember you’ve got Thompson blood,” she would say, and his father would laugh and say, “Yes, boy, look at the bright side.” And he would feel threatened, nailed down. Sometimes even now he would bite his lip, giving way for a second to his queer old fantasy of some error by Doc Cathey or the midwife, for well as Henry Soames knew who he was, the idea that a man might be somebody else all his life and never be aware of it—live out the wrong doom, grow fat because a man he had nothing to do with by blood had died of fat—had a strange way of filling up his chest. In bed sometimes he would think about it, not making up some new life for himself as he’d done as a child, merely savoring the immense half-possibility.
    But it wasn’t money that Willard would need. It was hard to say what it was that Willard needed.
    â€œWell,” Henry heard himself saying, “yes, sir, Willard’s a fine boy, it’s a fact.”
    But by now Callie was thinking of other things. Glancing around the room, she asked, “That everything that needs doing?”
    He nodded. “I’ll drive you up to your house,” he said. “It’s cold out.”
    â€œNo thanks,” she said, her tone so final it startled him. “If you do it tonight you’ll end up doing it every night. It’s only a few steps.”
    â€œOh, shucks now,” he said. “It’s no trouble, Callie.”
    She shook her head, a sort of fierce old-womanish look around her eyes, and pulled on