explained the relatively new one on the pleasantly crude Dutch door into the kitchen. What the hex signs meant he had no idea, nor could the doctor enlighten him, apparently. âInteresting, arenât they?â sheâd said, smiling. It was as if for her they were simply strange flowers that had one day, through no effort of hers, bloomed there, and seemed to do no harm. Mickelsson had his doubts. Each of them was set inside a circle of black, and Mickelsson knew enough of symbolism to be suspicious. But of course he hadnât pressed her. All over that section of Pennsylvania, though they began in earnest farther south, there were hexes. Heâd felt, if anything, a little pleased with himself for having found a place with special character; and except in those moods when nothing pleased him, heâd enjoyed that specialness more and more as time passed. (He would get up, mornings, after heâd moved in, and go out onto his lawn to watch the swallows lift and swoop, the martins step out of their high, red apartment house and fly heavily off to work, the fat catbird in the branches of the birchtree mewing crossly. Across the glen below his house, shadowy trees slowly darkened into view through their broad, low fogbank like ships drawing nearer. The yellow morning lightâhitting the barns broadside, giving the old, faded hexes sharp detailâcould fill Mickelsson, when depression wasnât on him, with a wonderful satisfaction.) The doctor had no doubt felt the same when sheâd lived here; had no doubt felt pleased, as he did now, when tourists stopped their cars and took pictures of the signs on the barns or the waterfall beyond. (In the large, unheated workroom that jutted out behind the house toward the rise of the mountain and the woodsâa room Mickelsson intended to convert, as soon as he could afford it, into a large, formal diningroom, not that he expected to be having much companyâhe found evidence of the magic the doctor cared most about: a picture of Jesus in a crown of thorns, looking mournfully, with gentle Anglo-Saxon eyes, toward heaven.)
Heâd walked up into the woods with her for a look at the old concrete reservoir, his water supply.
âIâm sure you wonât be having any trouble, Prahfessor,â sheâd said. âIt doesnât exactly come gushing, but thereâs only the one of you.â Her laugh was girlish, the laugh of someone perfectly at peace with the world.
Mickelsson had nodded, half smiling politely, standing precariously in his leather-soled shoes on the slope of crumbling shale and wet weeds, hatless today (heâd left his hat on the front seat of the Chevy), his red hair streaming as if angrily in all directions, tugged by the wind theyâd found up here, the tips of his pink, freckled fingers in his tight trouser pockets. It was probably true that the water system had never given her, as she said, a speck of trouble. She had the look of one of the elect. For Mickelsson things would go otherwise. The two pipes visible above the dark, clear water had orange, cancerous-looking growths of rust; they would disintegrate at a touch. And the overflow pipe, just above the ground-line, was large enough for a rabbit to crawl through. Sooner or later some rabbit would try it, it was a foregone conclusion, and the water would be polluted. But Mickelsson knew from his farm childhood, when rats would occasionally drown in the cistern and swell obscenely, that polluted water did not necessarily mean instant death; it was more likely to mean just a little more unpleasantness in the general run: a taste and smell that would gradually build up until suddenly, before you were quite aware of why, you were seized, sniffing your glass, by an urge to retch. He would get to the reservoir eventuallyâreplace the old pipes, put an iron mesh on the overflow. For now it would do. With luck, he thought ⦠and let the thought trail off.
Heâd walked up into the woods with her for a look at the old concrete reservoir, his water supply.
âIâm sure you wonât be having any trouble, Prahfessor,â sheâd said. âIt doesnât exactly come gushing, but thereâs only the one of you.â Her laugh was girlish, the laugh of someone perfectly at peace with the world.
Mickelsson had nodded, half smiling politely, standing precariously in his leather-soled shoes on the slope of crumbling shale and wet weeds, hatless today (heâd left his hat on the front seat of the Chevy), his red hair streaming as if angrily in all directions, tugged by the wind theyâd found up here, the tips of his pink, freckled fingers in his tight trouser pockets. It was probably true that the water system had never given her, as she said, a speck of trouble. She had the look of one of the elect. For Mickelsson things would go otherwise. The two pipes visible above the dark, clear water had orange, cancerous-looking growths of rust; they would disintegrate at a touch. And the overflow pipe, just above the ground-line, was large enough for a rabbit to crawl through. Sooner or later some rabbit would try it, it was a foregone conclusion, and the water would be polluted. But Mickelsson knew from his farm childhood, when rats would occasionally drown in the cistern and swell obscenely, that polluted water did not necessarily mean instant death; it was more likely to mean just a little more unpleasantness in the general run: a taste and smell that would gradually build up until suddenly, before you were quite aware of why, you were seized, sniffing your glass, by an urge to retch. He would get to the reservoir eventuallyâreplace the old pipes, put an iron mesh on the overflow. For now it would do. With luck, he thought ⦠and let the thought trail off.
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