Black Mountain Breakdown

by Lee Smith

  “Here’s your mail,” Crystal says, giving it to her, glancing down once at the little booklet on the top of the pile; it is named So You Sew! Grace must have ordered it. Grace is always sending off for things.

  Aunt Nora smothers Crystal, pressing her into her giant bosom, then pushes her back out to arm’s length and looks at her. “Getting prettier every day,” she says. “You look a little peaked, though. Come on in, we’re waiting dinner on you.” She pushes Crystal across the porch and into the old frame house where the air is cool even in August. The Spangler house is built in the old style, with a breezeway going straight through it from the front door to the back, four high square symmetrical rooms on the first floor, four identical ones above. The furniture, once considered very grand, is heavy, dark, and clawed, made in Grand Rapids forty years ago. Every available surface is covered with lacy things or little breakable figurines or pictures in curly gold frames.

  “Where’s Grace?” Crystal puts her overnight bag down on the settle in the hall.

  “Right here.” Grace’s small, shy voice comes out of the shadowed parlor. Grace is as thin and delicate as Nora is massive, smelling like lilac and old things as she hugs Crystal tight.

  “Crystal, you’re growing every time I look at you,” Grace says gently. “I’m so glad you’re here.”

  “I’m so glad to be here,” Crystal says politely, but it’s true, she is glad to be here, and she sits down at the big round table for Sunday dinner and looks down while Nora says the blessing. Crystal eats enough of everything to make even her aunt Nora happy. The food is good, all the vegetables right out of the garden, sweet corn on the cob, green beans cooked all day with slab bacon, chicken and dumplings, big round slices of tomato on a green glass plate. Everything is served in big bowls with steam coming off of them. Crystal eats and eats. She always eats things here she wouldn’t touch at home.

  A fly buzzes in from the kitchen. Nora slaps at it and it buzzes back out the door; no fly or anything else would dare to disobey Nora. Nora has surprisingly delicate table manners for such a big old woman, manners which are all that remain of her long-ago girlhood in Baltimore; she sits straight up and eats slowly, does not pile up her plate although she takes helping after helping of the food. Nora is in her sixties now, but she has not shrunk up the way that Crystal has seen other old people do. Instead she seems to grow larger with the years, erect and strong behind her giant bosom, wearing the men’s shoes and shapeless dresses which vary in color but never in style. Nora’s gray hair is so long she can sit on it, and she wears it pulled straight back into a knot at the back of her neck. Nora wears her eyeglasses on her bosom on a long gold chain, but Crystal has never seen her use them and can’t imagine that she would ever have to, Nora’s eyes are so bright and so black. Her strong face falls down from chin to chin and into the neck of her dress.

  “How’s your father holding up?” she asks Crystal, wiping her mouth.

  “Not very good,” Crystal says. “He doesn’t get up much anymore at all.”

  “He never was a stout one, even as a boy. Took after Emma,” Nora comments, shaking her head sadly.

  Down at the end of the table, Devere eats slowly and placidly, lost in the process of eating. He is Grant’s younger brother and he looks so much like Grant that it sometimes makes Crystal cry to see him. Except that all the things in Grant’s face which have gone hard and haunted and hollow are full and smooth in Devere’s. There is a calm, baby look to his face. Devere dresses in a clean flannel shirt every day regardless of the season; he moves slow. There is nothing much wrong with him that Crystal can see. She knows that Devere fell off the foot log crossing Dry Fork when he was a little boy, and did something to his head. She knows that he was in a methane gas explosion in the No. 6 mine when he was not yet twenty. But he doesn’t seem retarded to Crystal, not like pictures of retarded people in books in the public library with their tongues all hanging out. Devere does odd jobs for people up and down Six-and-Twenty-Mile Branch and Dry Fork, he works in the garden, and he keeps his tools in the toolshed all shiny. He raises hunting dogs that people come from everywhere to buy. He will speak right back if you speak to him, although he never has much to say. Sometimes he just stands still like he’s listening to something far away. Once Crystal told her daddy she thought Devere heard a different drummer after Grant read that to her in a book. “That’s about right, honey,” Grant had said. Devere loved her father and used to follow him everywhere, people said. But he never sees Grant now. Devere won’t go into town, hasn’t been there for years and years. When they need something, Odell gets it for them or Nora and Grace go to town in the pickup, and oddly enough it is Grace who drives.

  Devere folds his napkin carefully, pushes his chair back, and stands up. He’s a big man.

  “Not yet, not yet,” Grace twitters. “I made a coconut cake for Crystal.” Grace is also the one who makes the desserts.

  Obediently, Devere sits back down and unfolds his napkin and puts it back in his lap.

  Grace moves into the kitchen in her skittish, sideways fashion and comes back with the cake on a platter, little strings of coconut all over the white icing.

  “How is it?” Grace asks anxiously after she has cut and passed it.

  Crystal thinks she will die from eating. “It’s the best cake I ever ate,” she says with her mouth full.

  “Too much vanilla,” Nora says.

  “Oh, Nora.” Grace’s pretty little wrinkled face falls beneath the wisps of her hair. She tastes the cake herself. “Why, I think it’s pretty good,” she says.

  “Too much vanilla,” says Nora. But she eats two pieces all the same and Grace is pleased. Devere rises again and leaves, looking out the window.

  “I’m going to do the dishes,” Nora says, “if you all will help me carry them in.”

  “I’ll help you do them,” Crystal says, although she never volunteers to help out at home.

  “I will, too,” Grace says.

  “Not you,” Nora says to Grace. “What kind of help would you be? You’d just get in the way, that’s all, and besides you know how the heat does you. Go on in the parlor now, you all, and get out of my kitchen.”

  Crystal and Grace sit on the dark curved furniture, and out the window they can see the garden in the sun. Grace sighs automatically as she gets comfortable in her little chair and puts her feet up on her stool. “Heat does do me bad,” she confesses to Crystal. “Makes me feel dizzy, and I don’t know.” She stops abruptly. Crystal is used to Grace and the way her mind wanders off. Crystal loves Grace, and at home she has boxes and boxes of the tiniest clothes that Grace has made for her dolls.

  “Tell me about Grandmother,” Crystal says.

  Grace’s blue eyelids flicker and she begins, telling it all again, the way Crystal wants her to. “Well, we were all brought up in Baltimore, Nora and Emma and I, by our cousin Sam. We lived in a big house on the corner with poplar trees in the yard and we went to Miss Jenny’s school. Not every girl went to school in those days, but Cousin Sam said since we were orphan girls we would have to make our way in the world, so he was training us up to be schoolteachers.” Grace pauses and then giggles. “Amo, amas, amat,” she says. “Amor vincit omnia.” Crystal stares. Grace giggles again and goes back to the story. “After we finished up at Miss Jenny’s, we all went out into the world. But I only went next door, that was all, to teach the children there their lessons. Nora taught school on the Eastern Shore of Maryland and had one whole little school to herself. But Emma! Emma was the religious one, you know, the smart one. She used to go around with a bow in her hair. Well, Emma had a vision that she wanted to be a missionary of God and knowledge, that’s how she put it, and so she read in the paper about the Methodist Day School being started in this country and she sat right down and wrote them a letter and they took her right away.”

  Nora sings a hymn in the kitchen, clanking plates together in the sink. Grace whispers out the story in her soft, soft voice, and Crystal is
getting sleepy. She grinds her hand into the starched antimacassar on the arm of the love seat where she sits, rubbing the stiff lace against a sore place on her finger to keep herself awake.

  “Emma came here on horseback. That was the only way you could get here in those days, and after she had been gone a year we received word that she was engaged to be married to a Mr. Spangler. So Nora and I, we came, too.”

  And never left, Crystal knows that. “What was Granddaddy like then?” she asks.

  “Oh my,” Grace says, a watery opaqueness dropping now over her eyes. “Why, he was something, your grandfather was! You never saw a handsomer man. He was a wild one, of course. But he was crazy about our Emma, I’ll say that for him. He loved the ground she walked on. Nothing was too good for our Emma. If she hadn’t died so soon, he would have been a better man.”

  “What did she die of?” Crystal doesn’t know this part of the story.

  “It was when Devere was born,” Grace says, nearly whispering now because Nora doesn’t like it for her to talk so much. “And your daddy was three years old. We were all living in this house, it was almost new then. Something went wrong when Devere was born, some complication. I don’t know. It was one of those things they would know what to do about now. But she just never stopped bleeding, our Emma didn’t. A hemmorrhage of the womb, they called it. Oh, your grandfather almost went crazy. He carried her to Richmond in his lap, and then he brought her back. There was nothing they could do, they said. They could slow it down, but they couldn’t stop it.”

  “Did Emma die then?” Crystal asks. “Grandmother, I mean?”

  “No, honey, she lived on five months longer, and she was just the bravest thing. Even after she couldn’t stand up anymore, she still had them dress her up so nice every evening—we used to have help then—and she used to call me to put up her hair. Emma still had them fix a big dinner every night, just as nice as ever, and we all fixed up to come to the table, and your grandfather and one of his men would carry her down in her chair. She never ate anything, toward the end, but she was so brave. She pretended to eat. She tried to sit up in her chair. We used to have candles…” Grace trails off, then adds inadvertently, “Toward the end, the smell of the blood was so bad that the rest of us could hardly stand to eat. But we never told her that, poor thing. She was such a lady, she couldn’t have stood it to know.”

  “And then what did Granddaddy do?” asks Crystal.

  “Do? I’ll tell you what he did!” Nora comes sputtering in from the kitchen and sits herself down hard in the big old rocker. “He went right back to his awful ways and left us to manage those children the best we could. Do? I’ll tell you what he did. He went right back to sinning, that’s what he did, and went on sinning for the rest of his life.” Nora pulls a handkerchief from her bosom and wipes her face.

  “Do you think he went to hell, then?” asks Crystal with her father’s scorn in her voice.

  “Yes,” Nora says.

  “Now, Nora, you don’t know, you shouldn’t tell the child such things…” Grace twitters on like a bird in her chair.

  “She’s not a child,” Nora says. “These are things she has a right to know.”

  Through the window Crystal sees Devere coming out with a big pail of food for the dogs, and the dogs start jumping against the wire fence and barking like crazy.

  “I think I’ll go help Devere,” Crystal says.

  “I think I’m getting a headache,” Grace says faintly as Crystal leaves, and Nora says she is not surprised.

  Anyway, Crystal knows most of the rest of the story: how they buried Emma, and Iradell imported her monument from New York City itself at enormous cost; how Nora kept house for Iradell and hated him for twenty years. How her grandfather brought a woman named Mae Peacock and his own blood son by her, Odell Peacock, into this house and kept them there without even marrying her while she brought two more illegitimate children into the world; how Mae Peacock died, too, finally and Iradell sent her body back to her people at Caney Creek for burial, would not have her lying anywhere near his Emma; how Iradell was losing it all by then and how he brought a young girl, Goldie Coe, to live there and then took Goldie Coe to Charlottesville and bought her some new teeth after which she left as everyone said all along she would. How Nora and Grace and Grant and Devere still lived there after Goldie left; how Odell drove her grandfather everywhere in the car after Iradell could no longer drive; how once Iradell got away from all of them and crashed his big car in the middle of downtown Black Rock, where the road takes a sharp bend in front of the barbershop, running his brand-new Lincoln into the gray cliff face beneath the Bulova Watch billboard, Iradell breaking his own neck and paralyzing a young high-school teacher from the waist down as she crossed the street with her groceries. And now Iradell, too, is buried in his own graveyard.

  But wait. Crystal nearly forgot the surprise in the story. It is a slight surprise, nothing much to compare with the grandeur of Mae Peacock having her bastard babies in the bed Little Emma died in, or with Iradell Spangler crashing into the cliff on a payday afternoon. But here it is: sometime during those stormy years, Grace slipped off and got married. Nobody took much notice of Grace, she was so quiet and agreeable. She was always making flower arrangements and taking courses by mail. She was almost invisible in the war that raged on and on between Iradell and Nora, their hatred so intense it was mostly like love, their dependency on each other so total. But somehow, sometime, Grace managed to meet a traveling sewing-machine repairman named Mr. Hibbitts, a rheumatic mousy bald little fellow, and somehow she managed to marry him. Their marriage was kept inexplicably secret for seven years while Mr. Hibbitts made the rounds of his mountain towns, repairing sewing machines, seeing his wife presumably on the Black Rock run. In fact, the marriage might never have come to light at all if Mr. Hibbitts had not died suddenly of a heart attack, leaving his entire estate of six thousand dollars to his wife. Then how sick Grace was, how long she wore black clothes in mourning! while Nora paused in her work to shake her head and mutter, “I’ll swan!” over and over in complete amazement, and Iradell roared with laughter. But Mr. Hibbitts, too, is in the graveyard down the hill.

  Crystal shakes her head to clear it and goes out into the yard. Devere is in the dog pen and the dogs are leaping all over him. He is covered with bluetick hounds and spotted spaniels. Their frenzy seems crazy in this hot late afternoon, and Devere among them is as immovable as a wooden man. He sees Crystal and smiles. “Looky here,” he says, and brushes the dogs off him like bugs and takes Crystal by the hand around to the little pen where Dollie has got some new puppies.

  “Oh, Devere!” Crystal cries, getting down on her knees to feel them, warm and blind and squirming. They lick and lick at her hands with their little tongues no bigger than her thumbnail. She plays with them for a long time and Devere stands still, smiling and watching her, until the sun starts slanting down and it’s time for him to do some chores. Crystal helps him, and then it’s time to sit on the porch.

  NORA GOES TO bed early because she gets up every morning at five o’clock. There is not any particular reason for Nora to get up so early, but she has done it all her life almost, ever since she came to live in this county with Emma and found out that she was a country woman at heart; she took to the place and the life in a way that neither of her sisters ever had. Devere goes to bed at nine-thirty every night. So Crystal and Grace are left in the parlor and Crystal makes Grace tell her everything she can remember about Baltimore, about Cousin Sam’s house, and about her daddy when he was a boy. Crystal likes to hear about her daddy best of all.

  Crystal goes to bed in the feather bed in the downstairs bedroom where she always stays when she’s here, and waits until Grace has tiptoed in like a fairy in her long diaphanous gown to see if she’s asleep. Then Crystal sits up in bed.

  Crystal used to play a game when she was little and visited here. She made the game up so she wouldn’t be scared if she had to go to the bathroom at night, and n
ow that she’s older and knows it’s nonsense she still believes it a little bit, sometimes plays it still. This game involves wood. If you have to get up in the night, you will be all right if you touch wood all the way wherever you go. In her grandfather’s house this is easy because dark woodwork runs along everywhere. If you fail to touch wood, though, the ghosts will come, and then it will all be over. This is Sunday and the yellow ghosts come on Sunday nights with yellow smoke around their heads and long hot teeth. There are different-colored ghosts for different nights of the week. The green ghosts, on Fridays, are not as bad as the others, because they are very sad. It makes them sad to hurt you, but they can’t help it if you don’t touch the wood. Behind all the ghosts, beyond and above them, stands Clarence B. Oliver, the Ghost King, greatest of ghosts. Clarence B. Oliver is as big as the world. He can do anything he wants to. He can kill anybody he wants to, anytime. If you touch wood and are obedient and fair with the colored ghosts, then Clarence B. Oliver will be there when you need him to help you out. But you don’t mess around with Clarence B. Oliver. You don’t ask him for anything unless you really want it so bad you will die if you don’t get it, whatever it is.

  Moonlight comes in the window and picks out the fan pattern on the old quilt at the foot of Crystal’s bed. She smiles and traces a fan, green-figured feedsack calico, thinking of Clarence B. Oliver. Somewhere out there she hears an owl. Closer by, one of the dogs yelps in sleep and another wakes up to bark for a while and then hushes. It’s just light enough in this room to see. Crystal gets out of bed, touches the night table, stretches over to touch the dresser and holds to its grainy old wood while she tiptoes the three steps over to it and stands squarely before it, looking into the wavy, tilted mirror. She sees herself in shadow, backlighted; the dog barks again. Who is it there in the mirror? She sees long bright hair and no face, no eyes, no nose, no mouth. Moonlight spreads over the quilt. Who? she wonders, shaping the word with the mouth she doesn’t have. Who?