The Nix(83)

And everyone was quiet. Faye heard nothing but the air hissing out of the sizzling meat.

“Okay, jeez,” the father said. “I was joking, Frank. Settle down.”

And he took his beer and went into the house. And Faye and everyone else followed, leaving Frank out there alone. She watched him that night from a dark upstairs window as he stood over the grill and silently let the meat blacken and burn again.

This would be an enduring memory of her father, an image that captured something important about the man: alone and angry and hunched over with his arms on the table like he was praying to it.

He stayed out there the rest of the evening. Faye was put to bed. Her mom gave her a bath and tucked her in and filled her glass with water. It was always there, that glass, in case she got thirsty in the night. A short, wide tumbler, adult-size with a thick base. She liked to hold it on hot summer evenings, wrap her hands around it and feel its solidity and heaviness. She liked to press it against her cheek and feel its smooth crystalline coldness. And this was what she was doing, holding the glass to her face, when, after a brief and gentle knock, after the door swung slowly and silently open, her father appeared in her bedroom.

“I have something for you,” he said. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a small glass figurine: an old man, white beard, sitting with his legs around a bowl of porridge, wooden spoon in his hand, wrinkly face full of satisfaction.

“It’s very old,” he said.

He handed it to Faye and she studied it, ran her fingers over it. It was hollow and thin and brittle, the colors yellowed, about the size of a small teacup. The figure looked like a smaller, thinner Santa Claus, though with a very different attitude: Whereas Santa always seemed so animated and cheerful, this thing seemed nasty. It was the ugly smirk on his face, maybe, and the way he held the bowl so guardedly, like a dog tensing over food.

“What is it?” Faye asked, and her father said it was a house spirit, a ghost that usually hid in basements, back in old Norway, in a time more enchanted than this one, it seemed to Faye, a time when everything in the world must have been paranormal: spirits of the air, sea, hills, wilderness, house. You had to look for ghosts everywhere back then. Anything in the world might have been another thing incognito. A leaf, a horse, a stone. You could not take them literally, the things of the world. You always had to find the real truth the first truth concealed.

“Did you have one in your basement?” Faye asked. “On the farm?”

Her father brightened as he thought of it. He always brightened at the thought of the old house. He was a serious man who only seemed to cheer up when describing that place: a wide salmon-red three-story wooden house on the edge of town, a view of the ocean out back, a long pier where he fished on quiet afternoons, a field in the front bounded by spruce trees, a pen for the few goats and sheep they owned, and a horse. A house at the top of the world, he said, in Hammerfest, Norway. Talking about it always seemed to restore him.

“Yes,” he said, “even that house was haunted.”

“Do you wish you still lived there?”

“Yes, sometimes,” he said. “It was haunted, but not in a bad way.”

He explained that house spirits weren’t evil. They were sometimes even kind, would take care of the farm, help with the crops, brush the horse’s hair. They kept to themselves and got angry if you didn’t bring them cream porridge on Thursday nights. With loads of butter. They weren’t friendly ghosts, but they weren’t cruel either. They did what they pleased. They were selfish ghosts.

“And this is what they looked like?” Faye said, turning the figurine around in her palm.

“Most of the time they’re invisible,” Frank said. “You can only see them if they want you to see them. So you don’t see them very much.”

“What’s it really called?” she said.

“A nisse,” he said, and she nodded. She loved the weird names her father gave his ghosts: nisse, nix, gangferd, draug. Faye understood that these were old words, European words. Her father used these words sometimes, sometimes accidentally, when he was excited or angry. He once showed her a book full of these words, incomprehensible. It was a Bible, he said, and on the first page was a family tree. There was her name, he pointed out: Faye. And her parents’ names, and names above them too, names she’d never heard before, strange names with strange marks. The paper was thin and fragile and yellow, the black ink faded to lavender and blue. All of these people, she was told, stayed behind, while Fridtjof Andresen changed his name to Frank and came bravely to America.

“Do you think we have a nisse here?” Faye asked.

“You never know,” her father said. “Sometimes they’ll follow you around your whole life.”

“Are they nice?”

“Now and then. They’re temperamental. You mustn’t ever insult them.”

“I wouldn’t insult them,” she said.

“You could do it accidentally.”

“How?”

“When you take your bath, do you splash water on the floor?”

She considered it and admitted yes, she did do that.

“If you spill any water, you must clean it up quickly. So the water doesn’t seep into the basement and drip on your nisse. That would be a big insult.”

“What would happen?”