Black Mountain Breakdown

by Lee Smith

  Back at the graveyard, everyone else is leaving. But it’s hard to get Crystal to go. She wants to sit right there in her chair. Roger Lee tries to pull her up, but she doesn’t come. She smiles up at him brightly—after all, they’re going steady—but she can’t understand what he wants her to do. His voice echoes at her like he’s talking way down in a well. Roger Lee looks around for help, but Lorene’s back is turned.

  She’s saying goodbye now to Jules, who will leave right from here in his rented car and drive back to Ohio with Carter E. Black. Jules and Sykes shake hands and Lorene cries a little. Men, she thinks. They both are men, or nearly. Jules leaves and now everybody is leaving except Bill Hart and his men and Odell. Neva and Charlie are taking Lorene. The Reverend Garnett Sykes goes over to help Roger Lee with Crystal.

  Crystal is listening to how the canvas tent flaps in the wind. It’s almost like a little song. It’s like the wings of birds. Her daddy has died and now she knows it. This is all she knows right now, and her mind runs around and around this knowledge—it’s like a big rock in a field and she is roaming the field, playing. Every now and then she touches the rock and then skitters away. People are trying to distract her, but she’s not going to let them. She’s not. Roger Lee is talking into her ear on one side and Agnes on the other. She’d like to pull all of Agnes’s red hair out by the roots; she’d like to scratch Roger’s face with her fingernails. But that would not be good, that wouldn’t be nice, Agnes is her best friend and she’s going steady with Roger. They’re trying to help her, and Agnes made all that potato salad for Lorene: smile now at nice Agnes and Roger. Crystal smiles brilliantly up at Roger and Agnes.

  “Mama,” Agnes calls, and Roger Lee says, “Reverend Sykes?”

  They pull at her arms, but she won’t come, listening to the flap-flap-flap of the tent in the wind, the murmur of voices around her. The ground is too cold today for her daddy; but the highwayman came riding, riding, riding, the highwayman came riding up to the old inn door. They pull her up from the chair and she screams out. There’s no ground at all, nothing but empty space beneath her feet.

  Garnett Sykes shoos Roger and Agnes off like chickens. He puts his arm around Crystal and presses her to him.

  “Come on, now, Crystal,” he says. “The Lord in His infinite wisdom takes care of us all.” Garnett Sykes believes this absolutely. He smells like Old Spice. Because of his voice and his huge warmth and mainly because there’s nothing else left to do, Crystal believes him. Contours, outlines, objects return to the world. She puts her feet down on the wet freezing ground and walks on back to the car.

  THE NEXT SUNDAY, Crystal goes to church with Lorene. Lorene didn’t make her. Crystal got up and got dressed and suggested it herself. She goes the Sunday after that, too. There’s something about the program that she likes. It’s new and fresh every Sunday, smelling faintly of mimeograph fluid. A cross with lilies is mimeographed at the top. Crystal likes the way things happen in order, the way the program says they will, from the prelude right down to the benediction.

  She still has not accepted Jesus Christ as her personal Lord and Savior. She has not been born again. She sits quietly in church during Garnett’s long loud prayers and looks down at her hands. Garnett is famous for his frank, conversational prayers: talking man-to-man to God, he calls it. Crystal feels nothing at all during these prayers, except sometimes her mind wanders out the stained-glass windows and up into the mountains and she thinks of the Swift silver mine, or John Hardin, or any long story or song that she can. Grant’s absence is still there like the big rock and she’s still skirting it warily, getting used to it bit by bit.

  Crystal goes to school, dates Roger, giggles again with Agnes and Babe and Sue Mustard (after they have all finally gotten over being so solicitous of Crystal like she’s a piece of cut glass), joins the Methodist Youth Fellowship, helps Lorene pick out all the new furniture for the front room and choose a paint color for the walls from the bright little squares on the chart. Lorene is doing it all up in “earth tones”: pale-yellow walls, rust-colored shag carpet, little orange and green pillows here and there.

  One day in early March, she breaks up with Roger Lee. She gives him his class ring back, right in the cafeteria in front of about a million kids. She puts it down on the table beside his cardboard milk container. Then, before he can say a word, she takes off the pearl ring he gave her for Christmas and puts it down on the table, too. Roger Lee stares glumly down at his plate of half-eaten cafeteria food—soup beans, cornbread, Jell-O salad, and a square of yellow cake—and at the two rings there beside his plate, catching light.

  “Are you mad about something?” he asks.

  Crystal wears a lime-green V-neck sweater that day. “I’m not mad at all,” she says. In Roger’s eyes, she has never looked prettier. “I just don’t want to go steady anymore.” Big old boy that he is, Roger is near to tears. The whole cafeteria swims in his eyes.

  “Why don’t you want to go steady?” he asks.

  “I don’t know,” Crystal says. This is true. “I just don’t. I mean, we can still be friends and all. We can still go out.”

  “I’m not going to date you if you won’t go steady,” Roger Lee says. “You can’t just up and treat somebody like that, for no reason. Just because you happen to feel like it. What did I do? Just tell me, what did I do?”

  All the kids at the table have stopped talking so they can hear.

  “You didn’t do anything,” Crystal says. “Please don’t be mad.”

  “I’ll talk to you about this later,” Roger Lee says in a strangled voice. He picks up his class ring and puts it into his jeans pocket. “You keep the other one,” he says. “That’s a Christmas present.” Without looking back, he stalks out of the cafeteria and out to the gravel parking lot and gets into his car and leaves for the rest of the day. It’s the first time Roger Lee Combs has ever cut school in his life.

  Crystal leaves the pearl ring on the cafeteria table and walks off to English class. As soon as she’s out of sight, Judy Bond grabs the ring and puts it into her change purse. Judy Bond has had a crush on Roger for years. She will give him the ring and her sympathy and whatever else he wants besides.

  Crystal moves through the rest of the day pretending not to notice all the gossip around her. Roger’s best friend, Russell Matney, pointedly refuses to say hi to her in the hall. Russell calls Roger at home from the pay phone outside the guidance office between classes and tells Roger Lee not to feel bad, that they’re all bitches anyway. Sue Mustard, overhearing, flings Russell’s own class ring down on the floor in front of the phone booth and stalks off. Sue Mustard goes to find Crystal and console her, join her, be friends. But Crystal just smiles sweetly at Sue. “I can’t see what all this fuss is about,” she says.

  When she gets home from school, Lorene has already heard it.

  “I just can’t understand why you want to go and do something like that for,” she says, meeting Crystal at the front door and following her back to the kitchen. “Hurt Roger Lee’s feelings like that, after he was so nice to us when your daddy died. It’s beyond me. It really is. I don’t understand how you can just up and do something like that!” Lorene also can’t figure out how she can ever face Roger’s mother again if she happens to run into her in the Piggly Wiggly or on the street.

  Crystal sits at the kitchen table eating a piece of pecan pie. She looks up and tries to explain. “I didn’t mean to hurt his feelings,” she says slowly. “I would never want to hurt his feelings, Mama. I just don’t want to go steady anymore.”

  “Why not?” Lorene lowers her voice, remembering now that she’s got a man painting woodwork in the front room. She sits down at the kitchen table.

  “I don’t know,” Crystal says. “I just don’t. I’m tired of it. This is good pie. What came in the mail today?” she asks, and Lorene stares at her. Something in Lorene says uh-oh. Crystal seems completely self-possessed, the way Sykes used to act. Lord, if it’s not one it’s the other! L
orene thinks. Now Sykes has quit school and joined the Army. He did it right after the funeral, and Lorene knows instinctively that she’ll have no more trouble from him. She got a postcard from him just yesterday, from Fort Bragg in Fayetteville, North Carolina. And now it’s Crystal acting up. But she’s not acting up, not exactly, Lorene reminds herself. She remembers when her children were little, if they woke up in a bad mood she used to say they got up on the wrong side of the bed. This is more like that. Crystal has been too quiet, too normal ever since the fit she took at Grant’s passing. Now she has snapped out of it, she has awakened, and there’s something different about her. But Lorene can’t put her finger on what it is.

  Whatever it is, Crystal is not aware of it yet. She hasn’t done anything except break up with Roger, and she can’t see why everybody is acting like it’s such a federal offense. People break up all the time. Big deal. “Well,” she says, finishing up her pie, “you always said you wanted me to be popular. Looks like you would want me to date other people, too.”

  This is true, and all the plans Lorene had for Crystal come flooding back.

  “He is a little bit old for you,” Lorene allows after a while.

  “See?” says Crystal.

  Later she has to deal with Agnes, who comes over full of righteous anger and pity for poor Roger Lee.

  “I just don’t want to go steady anymore,” Crystal finally tells Agnes. She’s sure she’s said it forty times that day. “Roger Lee is going off to college next fall, so he doesn’t need to go steady, either. Listen, Agnes,” she says suddenly, earnestly. “There’s not anything in the world to do with somebody like Roger Lee except marry them.”

  Agnes sniffs and peers at Crystal close, but Crystal clams up and refuses to say anything else about it.

  When Roger Lee calls, Agnes has to answer, and Crystal refuses to come to the phone. High spots of color appear in Agnes’s cheeks: it’s an exciting afternoon. Agnes is the one who has to talk to Roger Lee and he sounds all torn up.

  “What if he goes out and gets drunk?” Agnes says after she hangs up. She follows Crystal around the house. “What if he wrecks his car?”

  “Let’s listen to records,” Crystal says.

  “What if he kills himself?” Agnes throws herself down on Crystal’s bed.

  Crystal giggles. “He won’t,” she says.

  They listen to records in Crystal’s room and Crystal plays her favorite several times in a row: “Love Hurts.” But it doesn’t, she thinks.

  Later, after Agnes has left and while Lorene is watching Huntley-Brinkley and fixing supper, Crystal goes to the new upstairs phone in the hall. She looks in the phone book and then dials and then speaks, keeping her voice down.

  “Can I please speak to Mack?” she says.

  II

  CRYSTAL AT SIXTEEN is everything Lorene hoped she would be, everything Grant was afraid she would be, too, only that’s beside the point since nobody talks about Grant much these days, and nobody seems to remember him much either, except for Crystal. Crystal is beautiful. Her skin is still fair and clear, and the color still comes and goes in her cheeks. Her hair is very long now and very light and silky, baby fine. She is perfectly proportioned, thin but not too thin, and she moves all the time like a dancer even though of course she has never had lessons; there’s no ballet in Black Rock. Crystal laughs and giggles and cuts up a lot. Find any party and she will be smack in the middle of it, dancing. She learns every new dance that comes along. At the end of last year, she was picked as Miss Best All-Around for the tenth grade. Now she’s a junior and they have elected her Miss Best Personality, and her picture has been taken for the yearbook. Everyone agrees that she has a good personality. She is so popular. But her face sometimes, in repose, looks sad—it’s the kind of eyes she has. “Bedroom eyes,” Sue Mustard calls them, giggling, but that’s not it. Crystal’s eyes are too large and too blue and too deep. When she’s not talking to anybody, when she’s staring out a window or not listening to a teacher lecture in class, her eyes seem like lakes, as if there are secrets in them, as if a mystery is there.

  For there is a mystery about Crystal: is she a good girl or not? She is a staunch member of the Methodist Youth Fellowship and the Tri-Hi-Y Club, she goes to church every Sunday, and she’s always real sweet and real nice. In spite of her popularity, she doesn’t seem stuck up. On the other hand, she will date just about anybody. Take Mack Stiltner. He’s dropped out of school now, drives a truck for the Piggly Wiggly and talks about moving to Nashville. Only he can’t leave town because he can’t seem to get over Crystal. She won’t go steady with him, though. She hasn’t gone steady with anybody since Roger Lee.

  This should be some comfort to Roger Lee, now in his second year at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, only it’s not. Roger Lee has pledged Phi Delt. He has made the starting lineup in football already. His grades are good. He dates rich girls with charm bracelets and A-line skirts, girls from Sweet Briar and Randolph-Macon, and they’re all crazy about him, but he can’t help it. Just when he thinks he’s really getting interested in somebody, he somehow sees Crystal’s face. It’s dumb, but he can’t get over her. His closest friends admire this tenacity a lot: Roger’s tragic flaw, they call it. It gives him an even greater stature among the Phi Delts in their columned house on Rugby Lane. They identify with the Old South and with getting drunk and with tragic flaws, tragic flaws are big this year and Roger can’t help it: sooner or later, he sees her face. When he’s home on vacation he calls and calls, and sometimes they actually have a date. On these dates Crystal is the same old Crystal, moody and laughing by turns, but nothing ever happens. All they do is talk, and Roger tries to impress her, but somehow he never does. He impresses other girls plenty—what is he doing wrong? Spider Marks, a Northern fraternity brother of Roger’s, has developed a theory about the whole thing. “What you’ve got to do is screw her eyes out,” he has told Roger Lee several times. “You haven’t ever fucked her. That’s why you’re so hung up.” At first Roger Lee was appalled by Spider’s gross Northern advice, but then he saw the sense in it. Only he can’t get anywhere with Crystal. For instance, he can’t bring himself to touch her breasts.

  Crystal even had a few dates with Horn Matney before he moved out of town. Horn is one-quarter Cherokee and his father is in the pen. Lorene tried to put her foot down, but she didn’t get anywhere. Crystal is polite and nice to her mother, but she does what she wants to and everybody knows it. Lorene deals with this problem by refusing to acknowledge that there is a problem, so there isn’t, and Crystal dates anybody she wants to and makes straight A’s in English and Social Studies. The boys and Agnes do all her math. Crystal reads the Alexandria Quartet, The Catcher in the Rye, The Robe, The Idiot, Raintree County, whatever she can get her hands on. She’s such a big reader, she’s so nice, that there couldn’t be anything wrong. Not with that sweet angel face.

  And meanwhile, what has happened in the neighborhood? Nancy’s grandmother had a stroke and they put her into the rest home in Galax, so Nancy doesn’t come to visit in the summers anymore. Jubal Thacker has become a teenage evangelist. He draws droves to the Holy Pentecostal Church of God, where his frailty and youth and his burning eyes often move people to speak in tongues. Agnes has finally stopped growing. At five-eleven she is a big strapping girl but not used to it yet, not to her size or to the way she is, so different from how she would like to be. Babe has started dating now and she’s a real trial for Agnes, and so is Agnes’s uncle Jud who got black lung and moved in upstairs. Chester Lester is in reform school now, and his mother’s back is a whole lot better. Both the Varney boys have joined the Special Forces and gone to Vietnam. Their mother has a big map of where they are, tacked up in the living room, with little pins to mark the places they name in their infrequent letters home, names like Saigon and Mekong Delta, but these names don’t have much meaning here in Black Rock yet, and the map looks weird on the wall with its winding brown rivers like snakes. Sykes is over
there, too. He has been promoted from corporal to buck sergeant, and Lorene is so proud.

  Crystal reads Dear and Glorious Physician and cries. She goes to see A Summer Place at the movies, starring Troy Donahue, and cries. Then she goes back to see it four more times. She reads and reads. Sometimes she goes back to her old favorites, even now: Charlotte’s Web, The Secret Garden, everything ever written by Laura Ingalls Wilder. She spends a lot of time up on Dry Fork, as much as Lorene will let her. She helps Devere add onto his pen. Grace crochets a lilac shawl for Crystal, and Crystal thanks her profusely but never puts it on; it’s all queer and out of style.

  One spring night she wears it, just for kicks. She has a date with Mack. It always interests Crystal to see if Mack can tell what’s tacky and what’s not. Usually he can’t, but how could you expect him to, coming from the background he does? Crystal preens in the shawl before the bedroom mirror, waiting for Mack. She pushes her lips together in a Sandra Dee pout. Then she whirls around so that the fringe ends of the shawl flutter softly, and pretends she’s somebody’s Spanish mistress, then a flamenco dancer like she saw on The Lawrence Welk Show Sunday night; and she kicks, staccato, at the bedroom floor.