Black Mountain Breakdown

by Lee Smith

  Pretty soon Neva is there, as fast as she can make it from the Clip-N-Curl, along with two of her operators and about half of the people from the beauty shop, all in different stages of getting their hair done. They park in front of the house and come right in and take over.

  Before she knows it, Lorene is seated in her rocker with three women hovering over her and one of Neva’s operators, Loretta Hurley, has got two pots of water already boiling on the stove.

  “It’d be better if you can cry,” Mrs. Ruby Wright tells Lorene anxiously. Mrs. Ruby Wright’s little eyes are glistening and darting around. “The best thing is to get it all out.” Mrs. Ruby Wright, a member of Lorene’s prayer circle, has three brush rollers on the top of her head and none anywhere else at all. She still wears a Clip-N-Curl towel at her neck.

  Loretta, skinny and competent in her blue uniform, steps back from the stove. “Anybody want Sanka?” she says.

  “You go on and just cry your eyes out if you’ve got a mind to,” Mrs. Ruby Wright tells Lorene.

  “Sometimes it’s a blessing in disguise,” remarks Ludie Compton. “Do you reckon he passed in his sleep?”

  “Well, poor thing. He’s been sick so long,” adds Neva’s other operator, Jean Potts, handing some sugar around. She has never seen Grant in her life, but she knows all about him because she has heard it from Neva for years.

  Lorene leans back and lets their voices rise up all around her. “You all are so sweet,” she says.

  Neva, big and able, appears at the door to the front room. “I can’t do a thing with her,” she tells Lorene, her voice high-pitched with exasperation. “She’s just sitting in there. She won’t get up for nothing. She won’t even answer me back.”

  “Who?” asks Loretta quickly.

  “Crystal,” Neva snaps. “Her girl.”

  Loretta goes in to see and the others follow, a high tide of voices and then a hush as they enter the front room, and they’re whispering at first when they come back out. “Now, isn’t that the saddest thing?” says Mrs. Ruby Wright.

  “Shock,” pronounces Hester Suggs, who used to be a practical nurse with the County Health. “She ought to go right to bed. We need to get her out of there, it’s not healthy.”

  Neva takes a deep breath and squares her shoulders. “You just stay right there,” she tells Lorene.

  Loretta and Neva and Hester Suggs go in to get Crystal, and then Jean Potts has to go in there, too. Crystal won’t come; she’s fighting them all the way. Finally Neva just picks her up around the waist and hollers at Hester to get her arms and somebody else to get her feet. Loretta, who is as tough as she is skinny, makes a grab for the legs, but Crystal kicks and kicks. She kicks Loretta right in the nose and blood comes out of one nostril. “That’s enough of that,” Loretta says, pulling off Crystal’s saddle oxfords and getting a good hold at last on her legs. Crystal is not very heavy, but she fights like a wildcat all the way as they carry her through the kitchen and finally get her up the stairs and hold her down in her bed. By then Lorene is there, too, leaning over, trying to stroke the face that keeps thrashing so wildly back and forth on the ruffled pillows.

  “It’s just shock,” Hester Suggs says again. “I’ve seen it a lot before.”

  “Well, it’s better to get it all out,” Mrs. Ruby Wright repeats, but even she looks doubtful as she tries to help them hold Crystal down.

  Crystal is embarrassing them all—she won’t stop screaming for Grant. Finally Neva sits on Crystal’s legs and stays there.

  “Everything is going to be all right!” Neva shouts at her. “You shut up that hollering, now. That’s not the way to act, Crystal Renée. I’m surprised at you. Look at your poor mother. She doesn’t know what to do, you’re acting so wild.”

  “Daddy,” Crystal screams, a weird muffled scream into the pillow, and she keeps on doing it until Dr. Lewis comes. He gives her a shot immediately, and she calms down, goes glassy-eyed and then to sleep. Neva sits on her feet until they are sure she’s asleep.

  “Now how about this nose, Doc?” Loretta says. “She like to broke it, I think.”

  While the doctor is still upstairs looking at Loretta’s nose, Neva helps Lorene back down and now the whole house is full of people: Agnes’s mama from next door, in her apron; Neva’s silent husband, Charlie, his truck parked out in the road in front of the Thackers’; Edwin Sykes, in a suit, asking everybody if arrangements have been made; his wife, Susie, wet-eyed and shaky beside him; Jubal Thacker’s daddy stiff as a post beside the door; smiling Bill Hart from the funeral home; others. The Reverend Garnett Sykes makes a spectacular entrance, coming in the kitchen door and taking off his hat with a flourish, lifting wide his arms. “May God have mercy on this house!” he says in a deep voice, and everybody there says amen. “Lorene,” Garnett says, still holding his arms out but lowering them a little, and she goes into them, held and comforted against the big wool coat. “Honey, it’s a blessing,” Garnett says.

  Lorene says something about the fit Crystal is taking, and Garnett says time heals all. Upstairs, watched over by Agnes’s mama, Crystal grinds her teeth in sleep.

  “We need to clean up that front room some,” Neva says, and several of the women go to help her.

  More people come, neighbors from up and down the bottom, men from downtown. A fidgety group of neighborhood children has gathered in the yard at the front of the house. People keep going in to see Grant. Lorene asks them not to at first, but after they get the room cleaned up she lets them all go in. Of course they’re curious. Most of them haven’t set eyes on Grant Spangler for years. Dr. Lewis clears the room for a while and examines Grant.

  “Heart failure,” he tells Lorene when he opens the door. “Pure and simple. That virus on top of the emphysema and the cirrhosis.” He adds, “I’m sorry.”

  “Well, it’s not your fault,” Neva says.

  “No,” adds Lorene.

  “No,” Dr. Lewis says, almost absentmindedly, looking around, and a small silence falls. The question of fault almost surfaces but does not; it’s not anybody’s fault, anyway, they know, all of them—nobody’s except Grant’s himself or maybe Iradell’s, but not theirs either, not really: you just never know how things will turn out.

  The question of the arrangements is debated; where will he be laid out?

  “He never left this room, poor thing,” Susie ventures timidly, but Neva says, “Well, he’s left it now,” and that decides it for Lorene. She will lay him out at the funeral home.

  “That’s the best,” Hester Suggs assured everybody. “You still have to live here, you know. I know I wouldn’t feel right about sitting in here after I had sat in here with that.”

  Odell pulls up in the drive in his pickup, still black-faced from the mine, with Nora and Grace in the seat. Nora comes in, nods shortly to everyone, and straightens up the sink. Grace is tearful and trembling. “I had a dream,” she says. “You might even call it a vision.” She looks so frail and weird and old-fashioned in Lorene’s bright kitchen, so different from the women there.

  “Don’t you think we should bring him home?” she implores Neva, and then Edwin and Lorene. She means lay him out up at Dry Fork, they see: and it takes the Reverend Garnett Sykes himself to hush her up and explain the arrangements.

  Agnes’s mama comes down to say Crystal is awake and will somebody please bring her a Coke or something to drink.

  Neva turns up the heat because it’s getting so cold in the house, the way the doors are being opened and shut all the time. Some people leave and others come; they’re bringing food now, too, and Mrs. Thacker lists each dish and who brought it as they come in. Like the others, Mrs. Thacker knows exactly what to do.

  Bill Hart is back with the hearse and his two assistants, but Odell won’t let anybody help him carry the body out. Odell acts like he might even hit Garnett Sykes, so everybody stands back while Odell picks up Grant, wrapped in a blanket now, and carries him out to the hearse. Odell’s black eyes are fierce and he mutter
s wildly under his breath and they all stand back out of his way. It’s hard to watch Odell staggering down the front steps with the body over his shoulder, Grant’s long legs swinging out from under the blanket behind, bony feet bare in the cold. Bill Hart turns away. He could have taken care of it all so tastefully.

  Upstairs, there’s another commotion. Crystal has gotten up to go to the bathroom. She has seen the hearse. “Don’t let them take him out of here,” she begs Agnes’s mother. “Please don’t let them take him away.” They call Lorene and she hugs Crystal to her as the black car pulls out, Odell in the front seat with Bill Hart.

  But Crystal pushes her mother away. She turns on her a face that isn’t like any face Crystal has ever worn, twisted and ugly and hateful, her eyes several shades darker and full of fire. Why are they taking her daddy? Where in the world is he going—Grant, who hasn’t left this house for years, off into the winter day with somebody he doesn’t even know? No one, no one may touch her. Because they may take him like that or think they take him, but in fact her daddy is all around her still, his presence filling the air. “Don’t touch me,” she spits at Lorene. “Get away from me. Get out of here. Don’t you think about touching me!” she says.

  “See if Dr. Lewis is still down there,” Neva tells somebody, and they go to get him, but Crystal snarls at him, too, like some kind of an animal. After she gets a shot she goes back to sleep, and this time she sleeps for a long, long time.

  That night while the others go down to the funeral home, she stays turning in sleep in her bed, and Grace stays with her, and Roger Lee Combs comes and stays downstairs. They don’t want him to see Crystal right now, and he doesn’t really want to, either. He would just as soon wait until she’s got it all out of her system. But he has volunteered to stay downstairs while Lorene has to be at the funeral home. His mother and daddy will go by there, he knows, like everybody else in town. His mother was dressing to go when he left. Roger Lee himself is wearing a plaid sports jacket over his shirt; he thought he should. Roger Lee watches Gunsmoke. When that’s over, he gets up and fixes himself a plate of food. Lorene said to. The whole kitchen is running over with things to eat that people have brought. The refrigerator is crammed full, and foil-covered dishes line the counters everywhere. Roger Lee takes some fried chicken, corn pudding, rolls, slaw, two kinds of Jell-O salad, a piece of German chocolate cake and some buttermilk pie.

  While Roger is eating, more people come in: Mrs. Ratchett with her famous corn lightbread, Miss Ida Rankin with a pot of green beans. “These come right out of my garden,” she declares, winking at Roger Lee. She is an old, old woman from way up on Dry Fork, a little bit touched in the head. “Put them up myself. He used to like them,” she adds, nodding wisely. “He used to eat them over at my house of a Sunday.” Wrapping her old coat around her, Ida Rankin moves back out into the February cold. It has started to drizzle. Roger Lee shivers in his sports jacket as he closes the door behind her, wondering who she meant. Crystal’s father? Crazy to bring beans to a dead man. Roger Lee eats everything on his plate and goes back to watch TV. He’s still surprised that Crystal’s father died. Roger Lee has seen Grant so seldom that he never really gave him credit for existing at all, and this dying seems out of place.

  Roger Lee is not surprised that Crystal is taking on so. His mother has always said that Crystal is “too emotional,” but Roger Lee doesn’t think so. He thinks everything about Crystal is perfect. Sykes calls up long distance just then, collect to say that he’s driving home and will get there about midnight, to tell Lorene not to wait up. Sykes’s voice is a lot more serious than anything Roger Lee can imagine coming from Sykes. Perhaps it’s a bad connection. Roger Lee goes back to watching TV and every now and then he hears Crystal’s aunt Grace say something upstairs, but he can’t hear the words and doesn’t want to. Her aunt Grace gives Roger the creeps.

  Down at the funeral home, Lorene is holding up pretty well, holding up being naturally what she is best at. She stands by the door dressed in a navy-blue suit and kisses everybody and shakes their hands as they come into the room where Grant lies. Beside her is her brother Garnett, baldheaded and massively holy, speaking straight into everyone’s heart. Garnett is a toucher—he holds on to hands a long time when he shakes them, he kisses women and children, he puts his arm around shoulders and squeezes. Garnett likes to touch people. He’s always conscious of himself as a living witness of God in the world. Susie and Edwin, all dressed up, are shaking hands, too. Nora sits in a big green leather armchair, and people go over there to speak to her. Odell is an embarrassment to everyone: he sits slumped in a straight-backed chair at the head of the coffin, looking madder than hell. He never went home to clean up, and he won’t say a word to anybody. Neva and her husband, Charlie, and her children are there; Edwin and Susie’s oldest kids are there; some old Spanglers everybody has almost forgotten about have come, including Blind Bob from up on Dicey, with his boneheaded handmade cane. When a lot of Peacocks come in the door, Nora won’t speak to any of them.

  “Don’t he look peaceful?” people whisper over Grant.

  “Looks like he just fell asleep.”

  Neva, who put a little bit of foundation makeup on Grant, is satisfied. Lord knows he doesn’t look good, but he looks better than he did before she got there this afternoon. Bill Hart does a good job, but he hasn’t got any eye for the fine points.

  They have dressed Grant up in an old blue suit they found in the closet upstairs, with a white shirt and a solid blue tie. With him lying there, it’s impossible to tell that they’ve got the clothes bunched up underneath him, the pants all folded over since he had gotten so thin. He’s visible only from the waist up.

  “He just looks so natural,” somebody says.

  But he doesn’t, Lorene thinks once, overhearing. He looks better than he has looked for years: eyes closed, face smooth with the foundation makeup, mouth closed, big features still hawklike but rested, out of torment. Candles bum on each side of him in long wrought-iron holders. The lights in the room are dim, with flowers everywhere. “Sixty-three arrangements,” Neva whispered to her earlier, but now they’ve lost count. And the people keep coming and coming. Everybody from up on Dry Fork, everybody from the First Methodist Church where Garnett preaches and which Lorene attends, innumerable Sykeses and everybody who knows them, men from different places along Grant’s boyhood and his past.

  THE CROWDED CHURCH is overheated for the funeral, which is mercifully short. As Neva said to Charlie earlier, there isn’t much you could read out of the Bible that would apply to Grant Spangler. Garnett keeps the question of Grant’s soul out of it altogether, sticking to Ecclesiastes and Psalms, and Miss Belle Varney outdoes herself on the organ selections. Agnes and Roger Lee sit on either side of Crystal, who looks at everything very carefully and steadily and doesn’t cry and doesn’t say a word.

  Crystal feels as empty as light, somewhere outside herself, seeing herself walk up the aisle, then sit, then walk back out at the end. The coffin is closed at the funeral and she has never seen her father’s body since Bill Hart and Neva fixed him up, but she hasn’t mentioned it to anyone, and nobody has mentioned it to her.

  Sykes holds Lorene’s elbow carefully, guiding her out. To everyone’s surprise, he has been a big help ever since he got here. As the family leaves the church, everybody says how sweet it is, and sad, Roger Lee and Crystal sitting together like that, and look at Sykes! and they all stare at Jules, who won’t look back at any of them, and at the weird friend he has brought home.

  Jules’s friend is a man of about his own age, with a beard and a neat three-piece suit. He looks sissy, like Jules. The friend’s name is Carter E. Black. Jules and Carter E. Black are very solicitous of each other and stick pretty much to themselves. Before the funeral, Lorene asked Jules—since he is a professor of English, after all—to write up his father’s obituary for the Black Rock Mountaineer, but Jules refused.

  Odell didn’t go to the funeral, but he’s waiting whe
n the cars pull up at the graveyard on Dry Fork, sitting bent in the wind in a folding chair. Bill Hart has put a little canvas canopy over the grave, and two rows of folding chairs for the family. It has stopped raining today, but it’s bitter, biting cold, with a piercing wind.

  Jules, whose field is the nineteenth century, thinks suddenly of how the Brontës kept catching cold at each other’s funeral and dying. But there is no way he can share his amusement with Carter right now. All Jules can do is silently turn up his coat collar and silently take his seat in the second row of folding chairs, after he has helped to carry the coffin. Pallbearer. Pall, the philosopher’s cloak. Hardly. Worn by Christians instead of the Roman toga. All palls. And is this all? Jules thinks furiously. Is this all there is to know, birth and breeding, the conqueror worm? Perhaps it is, but Jules will never know these things, not firsthand. He must make analogies, must draw them out from books. Jules momentarily envies Lorene her easiness, her openness, the way she holds on to Sykes now when she needs someone to hold on to, the way she holds on to his uncle Garnett. Jules can’t reach out and hold on to anybody; and if his mother reached out for him, he knows he would stiffen and move away. Jules glares at the cool slick coffin itself and behind it some flowers and the other graves and the fence and the hill. Suddenly Lorene disgusts him with her red-nailed grasping hands—he sees them on Garnett’s sleeve in front of him, her brassy blond curly hair. They have really fucked me up. Jules smiles and almost laughs out loud, for this is the final irony even in his world where irony is everything: to know that this is not true, either, finally, for he knows and has always known too much, has seen both sides of every coin. Jules sits perfectly still in the funeral-home chair, folds his leather-gloved hands in his lap. What had he hoped to learn here?

  Garnett sprinkles three handfuls of dirt on the coffin, in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. They lower it, and everyone rises to leave. Only Grace is sobbing, ladylike but unrestrained. “Hush,” Nora tells her firmly, but Grace keeps it up. She can’t help but remember Grant as a child right here on this place, herself not much more than a child, either, Emma’s little sister all dressed up. It’s as much for Emma’s little sister as for Grant that she cries now; it’s as much for Mr. Hibbitts, poor thing, with the winter leaves wet on his grave. “You go on to the house now,” Nora tells her, and Grace goes; she knows she needs a cup of tea. Nora follows her, heavily up the hill, and Devere is fixing a lamp in the parlor as they come in. Devere looks up and smiles. It’s no loss for him; for him, Grant Spangler died years ago when he left them and moved to town.