Free Mickelsson's Ghosts by John Gardner

mechanic’s coveralls. His accent was richly Susquehanna. “Every year abowt this time they come owt here and try to drown each other.” He reached out again.
    â€œDrown—” Mickelsson began, then understood that, despite the man’s tone, and despite the sombre landscape that made it half credible, it was a joke. “Ah,” Mickelsson said, and laughed. He got out his pipe. After a moment he asked, “Why here?”
    â€œHoly land,” the young man said, then turned to look up at him, interested to meet a being so ignorant, a city feller in a suitcoat, willing to be instructed. “You ever hear of Joseph Smith?” He cracked a laugh.
    Mickelsson nodded, then inclined his head. When he lit the match for his pipe, he saw that the young man’s face was round and dimpled, filthy with oil or maybe soot. The woman and the fat man beyond him had faces creased with age, though they were probably not old. Their teeth were sharply outlined.
    â€œHe used to live right back there.” The young man pointed past Mickelsson into the darkness. “Other side of the graveyahrd. Lived in a lot of diffrint howses arownd here, but that was one of ’em.”
    â€œAh!” Mickelsson said again. “So that’s what makes—”
    â€œSh!”
    The woman on the other side of the young man, apparently his wife, gat-toothed and pregnant, jerked her gray face forward and raised her fingers to her lips. The two women beyond her and the fat, sighing man, in a Phillies baseball cap, looked over in Mickelsson’s direction with interest. Several feet beyond the fat man stood a small boy in glasses, who never moved or spoke. There were others. Twenty or thirty feet farther on Mickelsson could make out bearded men and women in dark formal clothing—in the darkness that was as much as he could tell. He remembered hearing somewhere, from Jessica Stark, perhaps, that there were Mennonites up in the mountains. A mosquito landed on his neck and he slapped it.
    Now a strange sound came from the river—at first impossible to identify, then the next instant so obviously what it was that Mickelsson could hardly believe it had eluded him. They were singing. The bearded young man poked Mickelsson’s arm with the back of his hand and, when Mickelsson looked down, held something toward him—a bottle, he thought at first, but when he somewhat tentatively accepted the offer, feeling a quick little flush of distress, the bottle turned into binoculars. “Oh. Oh, thank you,” Mickelsson said, still startled by the magical transformation, and raised the binoculars to press them against the lenses of his glasses. At first he could see nothing but a colorful blur. He moved the binoculars from side to side and up and down until large, gawky shapes swung into view, disappeared, then appeared again. He realized for the first time that some of the Mormons were wearing white robelike things, sleeveless. He looked for several seconds. Some of the people looked eighty or more, standing there in the ice-cold water with their mouths open, grimly enduring. Their mouths and eyes were like pits. Fogwisps hovered over the water around them. Then he remembered that the binoculars were on loan and gave them back.
    â€œIs that robes they’re wearing?” Mickelsson whispered.
    â€œThat’s that underwear they gaht,” the man said.
    His wife shot a look at him to hush him.
    Ah yes, Mickelsson thought. He’d once spent a week at the University of Utah. Someone there had told him about the underwear they wore, with religious writing on it. According to whoever it was that had told him, they never took it off.
    He’d never in his life heard music so unearthly. Perhaps it was the shale of the mountainsides, or the breath of cold fog on the river; whatever the reason, the music, by the time it reached Mickelsson, seemed nothing that human voices could conceivably produce.