Black Mountain Breakdown

by Lee Smith

  Her mama turns sideways from the television long enough to say, “You know what I think? I think Crystal is doing just fine now. I think she’s turned over a new leaf.”

  A new leaf! Maybe so.

  “Now looky there,” Agnes’s mama goes on. “Look at that little old Rumanian!”

  Agnes settles back in her favorite chair to watch.

  CRYSTAL DRIVES FURIOUSLY UP Dry Fork, whipping around the curves she knows by heart. Odell’s big car jerks and shudders over the potholes in the road; the highway department has not kept pace with the mines. Crystal feels a little sick, ill at ease between places. When she reaches the old entrance she slows down. Little Emma Mining Co. Granite. But things have changed up here so much: big machines, new buildings everywhere. The exposed raw earth is wet and red, still sogged with snow. Some snow, left on the shady banks here and there, is gray with coal dust. The old house still stands, an anomaly among the huge bright pieces of earth-moving equipment, anachronistic with its little patch of yard, Devere’s dog pen in back. Odell and Lorene have been after Grace and Nora to tear it down, to put Devere into the hospital in Radford where he belongs and move into town, so they can be closer to doctors. Nora and Grace have plenty of money by now, from their interest in this land, but they haven’t changed a thing. You’d never guess they had money at all. Crystal parks in the mud. The huge forsythia by the mailbox is blooming profusely just like Lorene’s, gay and foolish in the cold wind.

  Grace, a little frail eggshell of a person now, all muffled up in an ancient blue coat with a shiny fur collar, is poking about at the side of the yard. Crystal goes over to her.

  “Hello, Grace,” she says. “Isn’t it a little bit cold for you out here?”

  “Daffodils,” Grace says. “Look.” She thrusts a whole handful of them at Crystal, smiling simply.

  “The wedding was real nice,” Crystal says.

  “Weddings are lovely,” Grace announces in her singsong voice. “Is Nora there? Is it time for dinner now?”

  “No,” Crystal says.“It’s still afternoon right now. I just drove up to see how you all are doing.” And to get out of the house, she thinks. But Grace has forgotten all about the wedding, humming as she picks more daffodils. It’s probably just as well. Crystal goes into the house, where Nora wants to hear all the details. She just can’t get over it—Odell Peacock and Lorene!

  “Why didn’t you come?” Crystal asks when she finishes telling it. “Odell would have been glad to come up here and get you, you know that.”

  “What do I want to come to a wedding for?” Nora laughs hard like a man, and Crystal can’t answer that one. Why indeed? Nora wipes flour on her apron and Grace comes in with the daffodils, sliding in sideways quietly, but Nora catches her after all.

  “Feet!” she hollers. “Look at your feet. Wet clear through. You’ll catch your death of cold.”

  Grace obediently sneezes and Crystal leaves them arguing in the kitchen and goes upstairs. It’s like a different world. There are four big bedrooms, each with its high ceiling and dark woodwork, its dark wood floor, its big windows with the wavy glass. At the end of the hall, one window looks out on Devere’s workshop, where he probably is right now, taking things apart and putting them back together, out past the workshop and the pen with the yapping dogs, on up the holler where the mountain lies undisturbed on one side, all rutted and cut up on the other. Bright February sunshine falls in a solid block all around Crystal as she stands, the sunlight alive with teeming, whirling bits of dust that spiral downward to the worn patterned rug at her feet. Crystal looks out for a while and then goes blinking out of the sun and back along the hallway, searching. But she isn’t sure what she’s looking for. The beds are made up in each room—Nora does that—and in each room Crystal finds a curious peace, a stillness, as if they are exhibits in some museum. Crystal goes into Devere’s room, which is the least cluttered, and opens his closet. There are Devere’s plaid flannel shirts, all of them almost alike. He wears a clean one every day; Crystal knows he has one on now, in fact, up the holler wherever he is and whatever he’s doing, helping somebody fix something, probably. Devere always smells just like these shirts. Nora has washed them so many times that they are as soft to the touch as baby clothes. Crystal fingers them awhile, her mind whirling.

  She goes into Nora’s room, with its big solid oak bed made by hand in this county, the stacks of magazines and clothes and boxes piled high along the walls. Neither Nora nor Grace can stand to throw anything away. A beautiful quilt covers Nora’s bed, fan pattern like the one downstairs; she made it herself. Another quilt is in progress. Crystal picks up the little squares of fabric and fingers them curiously. It’s hard to imagine that they will ever add up to anything as finished as a quilt.

  In Grace’s room, the brass bed has been shined to a deep dull sheen and the bed itself covered by an extraordinary bedspread, a peacock strutting along haughtily yet daintily, picking up his feet. His multicolored feathers curl in all directions to fill the bed. It’s a cheap chenille spread like the kind you see hung out for sale on clotheslines up and down the Shenandoah Valley, tacky and awful and beautiful all at once. Crystal knows how mad it makes Nora for Grace to insist on keeping this spread on her bed. But Grace has a painting of a rose on black velvet, too. Maybe she bought them at the same time. Crystal wonders when Grace might have bought them, what trip she might have taken and when. Every available surface in Grace’s room is covered with little china figurines, knickknacks, pictures in frames. Crystal looks at them one by one. She sees poor little Emma with a parasol, Nora and Grace and Emma in long dark dresses with big white collars staring solemnly into the camera with a painted backdrop of a lake, swans, behind them. She sees herself, her senior picture, smiling, wearing an initialed silver barrette in her hair. That barrette has been lost for years. She sees an Olan Mills photograph of her whole family, Grant and Lorene and Jules and Sykes and herself, grouped on a sofa, Grant looking slightly off to one side. She sees an old official picture of her grandfather, eyes stern and dark above his mustache and the awful jut of his nose, dressed up in a high collar with his hair parted right in the middle of his head. He stares straight out ahead through all the years, and Crystal wonders what he is thinking now. There’s a photograph in a little oval frame on the candle-stand table right next to the bed and she knows it must be Mr. Hibbitts, the long-dead rheumatic sewing-machine salesman. Mr. Hibbitts looks like a rabbit, scared of the camera, but his bulging eyes are sort of sweet. Crystal looks at all the pictures.

  She opens a little heart-shaped filigree trinket box she finds on the top of the chest, empties it and studies the contents: a ticket to a concert in Baltimore fifty years ago, mellowed and soft with age; a spool of white thread; a cheap gaudy bracelet of square red rhinestones; an unsigned Christmas card picturing a deer in the snow; a green felt ribbon; a place card saying “Grace” in ornate script; an old picture of some fat solemn baby, maybe Grant; a buckle with fake gray pearls; some plastic buttons. Crystal stares at the small pile of clutter, then replaces the objects one by one in their box.

  Crystal goes downstairs soundlessly, skirting Nora and Grace still arguing in the kitchen, having a big time, and goes down the basement stairs. Here it is very cold, damp, and the hanging light bulb gives little light. Off to the left is the furnace, old and dirty and huge. To the right is the storeroom, and Crystal opens this door and snaps on the light. More boxes, more junk. She begins poking through it all systematically, stopping once to light a cigarette and admire the lovely rows of canned vegetables in Mason jars which line the shelves. Every summer, Nora and Grace can for days, the old way, boiling the jars in a kettle on the stove. Seeing these vegetables now, dim and preserved behind their stickers, it’s hard to remember how Nora’s garden runs riot with them during July and August. There seems no relation between the bright ripe tomatoes or corn and these dusty jars. Poking again, Crystal comes across an old leather-covered journal in a box of molding Upper Rooms, Methodi
st home devotionals from years and years ago. She takes it out, opens it, sees “Emma Turlington Field, Accomac” written in spidery letters on the flyleaf. She turns the page and reads:

  Moonlight nights Will and the little Negro children would play marbles in the path near the door steps and I would sit and watch them. While I was always ready for play, I cared nothing for marbles except to throw them up or catch them on the back of my hand. When tired of play we would take a seat, one on either side of Mama, put our heads on her lap and sleep until bedtime. In summer she would spread us a lodge on the floor, but in winter she took us in with her.

  The women sniffed snuff and one day I tried it, too, they had to put me to bed, I was so sick.

  Mama used to often visit sick folks so one Sunday she took me with her to see a sick woman. Mrs. Fluheart. She took a basket of nice things for her to eat. Just before we started home we all went out to look at the garden and get a drink of water from a sweet spring back of the house. Around the corner a big dog rushed out from under the house, and standing on his hind legs, put his front feet on top of my head. I was frightened so that I screamed and fell. The others drove off the dog and quieted me, but from that day to this, I’ve been afraid of dogs.

  Crystal rubs her eyes with her hand in this dim light. This journal—or something like it—is what she has been looking for. Something to establish the past, continuity, now that Lorene has left. Which is so silly when you analyze it. After all, they’ll be back in two weeks. But just right now, today, she needs something to hold on to, so this might as well be it. Crystal leaves the storeroom, closing the door behind her, still holding the dusty journal, and climbs back up the steps.

  “Well, look who’s been down in the cellar!” Grace booms. “We couldn’t for the life of us figure out where you’d got to. Look at what you did to that pretty dress now. Turn around.”

  Crystal turns around in the hall. “Nora,” she starts, but Nora is brushing her vigorously, swatting her pale-green skirt.

  “Lord, that’s awful!” Nora declares. “You’ll have to send that to the cleaners.”

  “I will,” Crystal says. “Listen, Nora. Look what I found down there. Somebody’s diary. Who was Emma Turlington Field?”

  “Lemme see that,” Nora barks. She takes the journal, grabs at the glasses on her chain and fits them grimly to her nose, ignoring Grace, who twitters to see, like a bird, at her elbow.

  “I never saw this before,” Nora says finally. “Must be some of our people from around Baltimore, must be something Emma had. Where’d you find it, anyway?”

  “Down in the storeroom in a box.”

  “Shoot!” Nora says. “Look how she wrote. Looks like bird tracks to me.”

  Grace grabs the journal, retreats a step or two and fingers it, turning it over and over in her hands. “I think I remember seeing this,” she says finally. “I think it’s been here a long time.”

  “Oh, go on!” Nora snorts. “We never set eyes on it before.”

  “Well, can I borrow it?” Crystal asks. “I want to read some more in it.”

  “Oh, sure, take it and keep it as long as you want,” Nora offers, losing interest in the whole thing. “I don’t see what you want with it, though.” Nora’s tone is scornful, as if she herself reads better books and can’t be bothered with anything dull. But Crystal knows that Grace is the only reader in the house—historical romance after romance—while Nora sticks to the newspaper.

  “Well, I guess I’d better be getting along,” Crystal says, and stands up to their pleas that she stay at least for supper. “I have to grade papers,” she explains. She has three stacks of book reports waiting for her at home, and she looks forward to seeing if they have learned anything, if all that talk about paragraph development and transitional sentences ever sank in. Crystal smiles at her aunts. “Now you all tell Devere I said hello.”

  It’s late afternoon by then, and the mailbox sends a long slanted purple shadow over Odell’s shiny car. Crystal puts the keys into the ignition, then opens the journal again and reads:

  At times my brothers would dress me up in some of their clothes and one day they dressed me and put me up in a little plum tree in the yard. Someone hollered out, “Master Jack’s coming,” and they flew into the house, forgetting me entirely. I do not remember if Papa whipped us for it or not.

  Soon after that I had a gathering in my head which left me deaf in one ear. One day Papa wanted to give me a dose of Castor oil and he had to bribe me to take it with the promise of a nice silver thimble. I got my thimble and was very proud of it.

  Crystal shuts the journal and starts the car. She can see it all as if it’s happening right now: somewhere on the Eastern Shore, a little girl deaf in one ear wearing her thimble, playing marbles, afraid of dogs, all so long ago. These peculiarities delight her; this ancient, ancient Emma.

  Crystal has already parked in the driveway when she notices the other car there, parked in Lorene’s regular spot. But this is not Lorene, Lorene being of course on her honeymoon. Crystal is so used to seeing a car there that she didn’t even notice it at first. This is a Volvo station wagon, forest green. Crystal remembers seeing it somewhere before, but she can’t remember whose it is. Not Neva’s car, not Bobbi’s or Sue’s or Garnett’s or Sykes’s or Bunny’s, not anybody who usually comes by. Slowly, wondering, Crystal gathers up the journal and her purse and the jacket to her dress and walks around to the back of the house. She remembers that she has locked all the doors. She’s careful about that. Well, maybe it’s somebody visiting the McClanahans. Still, a premonition raises the hair on her arms and she walks slowly past the budding daffodils and the japonica and up the steps and opens the screen porch door.

  Roger Lee Combs sits waiting for her in one of the white wrought-iron chairs, wearing a plaid sports coat, his hat on Lorene’s glass table. He looks like he’s been waiting for a while.

  “Hello, Crystal,” he says.

  Like a sleepwalker, Crystal walks right past him and unlocks the kitchen door, then hesitates and turns back on the step. “Roger, what do you want?” she asks. Her head is light and very far away. She has papers to grade, things to do. But suddenly she’s conscious of the dirt on the back of her dress, and she halfway turns in the door to hide it.

  “I just want to talk to you,” Roger says, standing up. Crystal has forgotten how big he is. “Aren’t you going to let me come in?”

  “Come on in, then,” she says, and goes in and leaves the door open behind her. Roger sits down in the armchair in Lorene’s conversation area and Crystal goes over to the sink and washes her hands.

  Roger appears calm, watching her, but Crystal almost doesn’t know what she’s doing. She drops the towel on the floor.

  “Come over and sit down,” Roger says.

  Crystal sits on the edge of the love seat. “Roger, what are you doing here?” she blurts. “You know you haven’t got any business coming over here like this.”

  But Roger leans back in the chair. “I’ve waited a long time to come,” he says. “I waited as long as I could. I just want to see you,” he says.

  “But I’ve seen you!” Crystal finds herself suddenly and embarrassingly near to tears. “I’ve seen you all over the place for months, Roger. I see you at the country club, I see Judy at the book group, I saw you just the other day at Agnes’s store. I was downtown buying some nails for Odell. Don’t you remember that? I was buying some nails.” Crystal’s voice goes up higher and higher and she knows she can’t control it.

  “I remember that,” Roger says calmly. He crosses his legs like he has all the time in the world.

  Crystal bites her lip and sits back on the love seat, pulling her skirt down as far as it will go. “Well, I’ve seen you,” she says again. “God knows, I’ve seen enough of you to last me for the rest of my life. Before, I mean,” she adds. Now she’s really angry and for the first time she looks at Roger directly, her eyes losing for once their deep limpidity, flashing. Roger looks straight back
. His eyes are calm. His whole face is calm. She sees that Roger has aged well. When he was younger, his face looked silly to her sometimes, so grave and so thoughtful and conscientious stuck up there on a teenage body, like one of those cardboard cutouts you step behind to get your picture taken at carnivals. When she was a girl, she used to do things on purpose to try to shake up Roger’s face, to disarrange those careful features. Once when he had sprained his back playing football he had to wear a back brace for two months, and somehow Crystal has kept this image of him, sitting up ramrod straight in any chair with that giant Ace bandage around his ribs beneath the shirt.

  She sees that this image is no longer accurate—if, in fact, it ever was. He doesn’t look braced any longer. He still sits up straight, but he is relaxed like that, and his body has filled in and changed to fit his face. Now Roger is handsome in a dependable way, twenty pounds overweight, gray streaking his brown hair, a deep line already there between his eyebrows. Strangest of all, he has a mustache, mostly gray. Suddenly self-conscious, Crystal drops her eyes to the floor and sees his dark-brown lace-up shoes, the kind of shoes Jerold used to make fun of. Size twelve and a half, she remembers. It’s surprising how much she already knows about Roger. He’s like a big aberration, filling up this whole room. Only that’s not right, either. He’s not aberrant, she’s wrong—she is the aberrant one. She was the one who left. Roger has always belonged in this house; just look at him. But Crystal doesn’t know what to do with him there. He is watching her so closely, so kindly. He has such trustworthy light-brown eyes. No wonder he’s making a fortune. Anybody would buy anything from him; anybody would trust Roger Lee.

  He smiles at her, warm and slow. “I wish you’d relax, Crystal,” he says. “I’m not going to rape you.”

  “Why did you say that?” she snaps. “Don’t be ridiculous.” She lights a cigarette. “Well, what do you want?” Now she’s not mad or frightened so much as curious.