Black Mountain Breakdown

by Lee Smith

  In a little while Crystal says she thinks he ought to rest, but Grant wants to talk. Lately he has been talking more and more, rasping on in his hoarse voice, telling Crystal all the old stories he knows. And even Crystal, who loves stories, sometimes gets tired he tells so many. Some are grotesque. Once, he said, when he was a boy, he had to go and take a letter from Iradell to a man who lived way up on Hoot Owl. He rode his black pony named Bud. And when he got to the house with the letter, he could see in the window where they were all sitting around having Sunday dinner. He could see the man inside at the head of the table facing the window, his napkin at his neck. But just then, before Grant the child rode his black pony into the clearing, along came a man on foot with a rifle, out of the tall trees on the other side of the house, and walked right up in front of the house, where he raised the rifle, took careful aim, and fired through the open window. Then he turned and left. Grant saw through the window how the man inside fell over, face down in the gravy.

  And now Grant is telling her about the time they hanged John Hardin. Crystal sits on the floor by the sofa and listens. “It was cold, Crystal. Somewhere around the middle of December. I was little then. And people came from all around, Dickenson and Wise and Pike Counties, to see John Hardin hang. They slept anywhere they could find, some of them in wagons, in spite of the cold. They built up fires in the road to keep warm.” Grant coughs and stops to get his breath and Crystal asks, “But what did he do?”

  “He shot a man, honey,” Grant says. “On the day before the hanging, John Hardin wanted to be baptized, and so the sheriff brought him out and took him to the river, where Elder Wallace Compton from the Regular Baptist Church did the baptizing. John Hardin told everybody then that he was prepared to die and didn’t want to live any longer. He never did show any sign of breaking down or weakening.

  “At twelve o’clock the next day, they brought him out dressed in a neat black suit that the sheriff and some others had bought for him, and he looked as cheerful as if he was starting out to a wedding and not to death. He jumped up on the wagon, sat right down on his coffin, and they drove him over to the scaffold, which was about where the Magic Mart is now. At the scaffold Hardin walked right up to the trap, joined in the singing and the prayers, and shook hands with everybody there in reach. He said he wanted all the people to know why he was there, that it was for killing a man on account of his wife, and his wife was the cause of it all. He said he hoped she was sorry now. He said he thought he was doing right when he killed Mounts, but now he saw he was wrong. But the Lord had forgiven him for it anyway, he said, and he was ready and willing to die. He told all the men to keep away from liquor and low women”—here Grant smiles—“as that was what had brought him to the gallows. He sang a song that he wrote himself.

  “The sheriff told him he had nine minutes to live, and he smiled and said, ‘That is a short life.’ He told the sheriff he had a piece of tobacco in his pocket which he wanted him to take out of his pocket after he was hung and give to your aunt Nora.”

  “Nora!” Crystal sits up straight. “What did he do that for? Did he know Nora?”

  “I doubt it, honey. He just admired her, I suspect. He was a little bit crazy, too, I guess. A man in his position would have to be.”

  “What else did he say?” asks Crystal.

  “He told the sheriff not to tell him when they let him drop, and then he told Professor Mullins he was going to heaven. As he stepped onto the trap door, he took a stub of cigar from his mouth and told the sheriff he’d leave that to him. Then at one o’clock the sheriff adjusted the rope and sprung the trap, and they took him down at two and then his people took him home.”

  “Then what happened?” Crystal asks.

  “That’s it,” Grant says. “That is the end of the story.” Grant’s eyes are closed and he seems almost to sleep, so Crystal moves to go.

  “No,” Grant says. “Not yet. Listen, Crystal. Listen. A long, long time back, in the late seventeen-hundreds, an Englishman named John Swift rescued another white man, named Mundy, from the Shawnees around here. While he had been living with the Indians, Mundy had heard tell of a silver mine, and so he and Swift set off to find it. They found it here, honey. Listen. Right here, somewhere up on Black Mountain. They started mining it. They traveled with pack mules, supplies, and a crew of men every fall, down from northern Virginia. They mined all winter long. It was sort of a secret operation, but it was considerable. Swift put in a furnace to melt silver and a mint to make the coins. They say that one spring he packed out two hundred mules and all of them loaded down.

  “But the Indians raided the mine, again and again. Listen. There were no white men here then, and the Indians captured Swift’s boy because he couldn’t keep up with the rest of the miners who were running away from the Indians. Swift looked back, and when he saw that they had got the boy, he shot one time and killed him so they couldn’t torture him to death. Then Swift left and he never came back. Some people say he was caught and sent back to England for some crime, other people say the Indians destroyed the trail and the silver mine both.”

  The wind is coming up outside. Crystal knows it’s time to take their supper out of the oven, but she sits still and says, “Then what? Hasn’t anybody ever found it?”

  “No, nobody has never found it. But plenty of people have looked. One man thought he found it, Joe Vandyke’s grandfather I think it was, but when he went back again he never could find the place.”

  “Did you ever look for it?”

  Grant’s laugh is short. “Yes, I used to look for it,” he says.

  Crystal fixes their supper and brings it in and they eat in the half-light of the front room. The phone rings once, but Crystal doesn’t answer. She’s carrying the tray back.

  “Crystal!” her daddy calls while she’s cleaning up the sink. “Crystal!”

  When she goes back into the front room he says, “Crystal. Listen,” but he pauses too long and falls asleep. Crystal straightens up the room a little. She notices the new red robe from Sykes still inside its plastic wrapping. She takes it out and takes out the pins and lays it across the back of the sofa: tomorrow, maybe, she can get him to put it on.

  Five minutes later Lorene is back, full of gossip and malice and loud good humor, and the television goes on and the phone rings. “It’s for you, Crystal,” Lorene says with her hand over the receiver. “It’s Roger Lee,” she whispers.

  Crystal picks up the receiver.

  “Hello,” she says.

  “You wouldn’t believe how Susie is spoiling that baby!” Lorene says.

  “Whatcha doing right now?” asks Roger Lee.

  HER DADDY TAKES a turn for the worse after that, and for the next two weeks Lorene and Crystal are so busy taking care of him that Crystal gets way behind in school and makes a D on her algebra midterm. Finally Grant seems better, still weak but the fever is gone at last, so Crystal goes up to spend the night on Dry Fork with her aunts and Devere. She hasn’t been up there—or anywhere—for a long time, so she was glad to say yes when Nora called.

  In fact she feels better with each turn as they climb the mountain road. It’s so cold—maybe Nora has made a fire. When Crystal arrives it’s already dark, dinner time, and sure enough the fire is blazing. Devere is not there yet, but they go ahead and eat without him since everything is ready, and after they’re through eating Nora sends Crystal out to tell Devere to come in from the toolshed. Sometimes he loses track of the time. Crystal pulls her sweater tight around her going across the dark back yard, and the wind goes right through her corduroy pants as her shoes sink down in the mushy grass.

  Crystal comes into the shed. “Hi, Devere,” she says. “Nora says it’s time for you to come on in the house.”

  Devere stands absolutely still, holding his open-end wrench carefully in one red hand. Crystal doesn’t feel so good all of a sudden. She feels like she’s going to faint.

  “Devere,” she says.

  Devere stares at the wrench
like he doesn’t know where it goes, but he has a place for everything in his toolshed. Devere stares at the wrench.

  “Watcha doing, Devere?” Crystal says. He’s always still and slow but not this still. Usually he will answer back. In the harsh white light from the single hanging bulb, Crystal sees Devere’s face moving. Some expression on it is struggling to get born. Crystal doesn’t say what she was going to: she stares. It’s so funny. She has never seen any expression at all on Devere’s smooth face, the face so much like her father’s, but different and softened out. “Devere?” she asks again but he won’t answer, circling her, until he gets between her and the door. He holds the wrench easily and lightly now, as if it’s a part of his arm; it shines in the light from the hanging bulb. Without even thinking about it, Crystal is backing up, backing up, until her back is against Devere’s work table, as far as she can go. She strokes the wood and whispers the words for the ghosts, who do not come. Devere comes and pushes her down on the cold dirt floor, and the wrench drops at last from his hand. Later Crystal can never remember this or anything about it, but by the time Odell comes in looking for Devere to fix a truck, Devere has left the toolshed and is already out at the pen with the dogs and Crystal is sitting on the damp dirt floor.

  “Devere around?” Odell asks. He holds some machine part in one gloved hand. Odell wears a black leather cap with the earflaps down, and coal dust rings his eyes like makeup. He looks like a raccoon, Crystal thinks. But something hurts her so bad. Odell’s raccoon eyes squint down at her, move away, travel the shed, come back.

  “You all right?” he asks. Odell doesn’t talk much to women, and his voice is rough and short. “What you doing down there?” he asks.

  Crystal sits hugging her knees. “I must have fainted,” she said. “I came out to look for Devere.” She feels really weird, lightheaded and cold all at once. Her legs hurt and she’s got cramps. “I guess I’ve got a virus,” she says.

  “Well, you’d better get up from there.” Odell’s black eyes dart back and forth. “Nora’s been calling you. It’s time to come on in the house.”

  Odell helps her up and then they leave the toolshed, Odell going toward the dog pen and Crystal back across that grass to the house. The dogs are all barking and in the light from the house she can see Devere’s big outline in the pen, the dark jumping shapes of the dogs. Feeding them late, most likely. She has to concentrate to make her legs work right to go through the back yard.

  “Crystal! You Crystal!” Nora’s on the back steps, looking out.

  Crystal breathes in the cold dark air, walking. Walking gets easier. Smells like more rain in the air, with a slight sulphur scent from the slag heap up at the fork. Odell comes out of the dark. He chews tobacco and smells like it, holding her elbow, looking at her. “How do you feel now?” he asks shortly.

  “Not very good,” Crystal says. “Awful.” But then she has reached the house and Nora is giving her aspirin, making hot tea with mint in it, putting her on the horsehair sofa in front of the fire with an afghan around her. That night she sleeps hard in the bed in the room with her father’s initials on the windowsill, W.G.S., the room where she always stays, and she does not dream.

  THE NEXT DAY Crystal eats a big breakfast with her aunts and Devere, pancakes Nora made and fat hot sausage cakes and apple butter. She feels much better although she still aches. “Must have been a virus,” Nora says. “You know how you ache with a virus.” Grace wears a fancy white crocheted shawl at the breakfast table and sneezes delicately into pink Kleenex. Cold does her bad, too. Devere eats methodically.

  Odell comes knocking, holding his hat in his hands and turning it, bringing in the morning. First he takes Devere up and leaves him off at his mine to look at a radiator; then he comes back and gets Crystal and drives her down into town. It’s still early morning, and all their words make smoke puffs in the air. Crystal tells him she’s feeling much better and thank you. Odell stays in the truck while Crystal gets out in front of her house, goes around the house and in the open back door. She hears the roar of Odell’s truck as he goes away.

  “Mama?” Crystal calls, but Lorene is not in the kitchen. She must be over at the McClanahans’, because her car’s still there in the drive.

  “Daddy?” Crystal puts down her overnight bag and goes into the front room. “Daddy?” she says again. She’s still wearing her coat.

  Grant lies on his pillows, one hand on his chest with the fingers curled like he’s trying to hold on to something, the other arm hanging off the sofa with the fingers open and limp. His neck is at a funny angle, hanging slack over to one side against the pillow. When Crystal goes over to straighten his covers, he does not move. He doesn’t open his eyes. Crystal takes his hand, presses the fingers together, rubs them. He doesn’t move his fingers; he won’t hold her hand like he used to. Crystal lets go of his hand and touches his cheek, softly, her fingers fluttering over the skin. His skin is still warm to the touch, but he’s dead and she knows it now. Of course he’s dead; he’s not even breathing. It’s funny how that’s the last thing she looks for. No breath: under the blue silk robe, his chest is still, so still it’s almost sunken. Crystal sits down on the floor where she always sits, and leans back against the sofa. Back and forth, back and forth she rubs the end of the tie of the blue silk robe between her fingers, back and forth, and the whole world falls away from her by degrees until nothing at all is left.

  LORENE COMES home thirty minutes later, yodeling in at the door, “Crys-tal? Crys-tal? You back, honey?” Lorene takes her coat off, puts it over the back of a kitchen chair, and claps her hands together briskly to get the cold out of them. She glances around her kitchen. It’s all clean, all straight, everything from breakfast dried and put away; she did that before she went over to the McClanahans’ to look at the new book of spring patterns from Simplicity that Agnes’s mama sent off for. Little specks of dust dance in the shaft of light that comes in the kitchen window. The whole house is still and quiet. Out of the corner of her eye, Lorene notices something: Crystal’s overnight bag on the floor by the wall. “Crys-tal?” she yells. Dust twirls softly in the path of light and nobody answers her call.

  Without hesitation or haste, Lorene crosses her spotless kitchen to Grant’s door and pushes it open and goes in. It takes a minute for her eyes to adjust to the dark. When they do, she gulps in her breath sharply and one hand flies straight up to her mouth. She has always known she would come in here one day and see this, find Grant dead. He’s had death in him for years, as plain as the nose on your face. Lord, Lord, she prays, I hope you have got some kind of a place for Grant. Since he never found a place on this earth, she adds. Amen. Lorene leans against the wall for a minute, remembering of all things the first house they lived in, one of Iradell’s company houses up on Dry Fork, her mother’s old brass bed with the log cabin quilt, and the wide pine planks on the floor. Young then, Grant fascinated her. She never knew anybody like him, she who was such a worker and lived by the clock. She never knew anybody so full of dreams. Well. Lorene straightens up and smooths her skirt. What’s done is done. But you can’t throw the baby out with the bath water, and all the things she has to do now come crowding into her head. First, Crystal Renée.

  Lorene goes over to the sofa. Crystal sits on the floor, looking down, holding one end of the belt of Grant’s robe. Crystal’s hair divides evenly down the back of her head and falls down in front of her shoulders. When Lorene leans over, she can see the white line of scalp in the part at the nape of Crystal’s neck. This makes her want to cry in a way that nothing else does. But she doesn’t cry. She puts her hand gently on Crystal’s head.

  “Come on, honey,” she says. “Let’s go.”

  Crystal neither moves nor answers, though her fingers work at the silk.

  “Crystal,” Lorene says in a firmer voice, “your daddy has passed away, honey. You come on and lie down. We have to call the doctor, we have to do a lot. Or you could go over to Agnes’s for a little while right now.
”

  Crystal doesn’t move.

  “Come on, now,” Lorene says quite firmly. “Get up from there.”

  Crystal doesn’t move.

  Lorene shakes her daughter’s shoulder hard. “You come on, now,” she says.

  Crystal’s long hair swings back and forth in the halflight. She won’t look up at Lorene.

  “Well.” Lorene snaps on a light. The room grows suddenly smaller and dirtier, becomes any old neglected room. Lorene sees the dust on everything and wonders what people will think. If she can just get Neva over here. If she can just get Crystal to get up from that floor. Grant looks terrible in the light, worse than she had thought he would. At least those eyes are closed.

  “Crystal!” she says.

  “Yes, ma’am,” Crystal says in a perfectly normal voice. “You go ahead. I’ll just stay here with Daddy, I think.”

  Lord God. Lorene almost runs back into the kitchen, and her fingers shake as she dials the Clip-N-Curl. She knows it’s their busy day. “I need to talk to Neva,” she says when somebody finally answers. “I don’t care if she’s doing a permanent or what she’s doing,” she snaps. “Get her on here.”

  But when Neva gets on the line, Lorene can barely speak. “Neva,” she says finally, after Neva has said hello three times in a row, “you’ve got to come over here. Grant has passed away. This morning, I guess. I don’t know. I don’t know exactly. Crystal did. I don’t know. No, I haven’t had a chance to call him yet. I will. OK. I will. But, Neva, you’ve got to come on over, I can’t get Crystal out of there. I don’t know. She was up at Nora and Grace’s spending the night. I don’t know. ’Bye.”

  Lorene hangs up the receiver, wipes her hands on her skirt, calls Garnett and Edwin, looks in the phone book and starts dialing again. She has one moment of pure anger after she calls up Bill Hart at the Black Rock Funeral Home. She might have known Grant would go like this! He always loved to get Crystal all wrought up.