Black Mountain Breakdown

by Lee Smith

  “No.” There is no emotion in her voice. Crystal stares at Roger’s face. She thinks suddenly of a short-answer section she gave to her high-school students on their midterm exam, so long ago. “In the following work,” she had directed, “identify the hero.” Well, Roger is the hero, always was. But she is out of the book. Crystal sighs.

  “I need to go home.” It’s almost the only thing she has said since they found her.

  “Think about me,” Roger says. “What about me?”

  “Believe me, you’ll be a whole lot better off,” Crystal says flatly. “You will,” she adds with more force than she has shown before. “You will, Roger. Believe me. It’s all for the best.”

  “I don’t want you to go home!” Roger nearly yells, standing up. “Goddammit, Crystal, you’ve been there! It’s not home anymore, don’t you understand that? This is home, here, with me. All you need is some medical attention, some rest, and—”

  “No, I’m going home.”

  “Well, by God, if you do, I’ll tell you one thing!” Roger is all worked up. He lights one of Marion Fitts’s cigarettes; normally, he doesn’t smoke. But he has a right to get worked up, by God. He gave up everything for her, everything for this silent girl here on the sofa. He gave it all up and was glad to and then he built it all back, a new life for him and Crystal. For their children, for the family he had hoped they would raise. A house anybody would be proud of, a life anybody would want. “I’ll tell you one thing, Crystal. If you go, you’re not coming back. I’m not coming to get you. If you go that’s it, that’s the end of it, it’s over. A man has to draw the line somewhere. Now, do you understand that? If you go, you stay.”

  “I know it,” Crystal says. “I will.”

  “Well,” Roger says. He sits back down in the wing chair. “Well, well,” he says. He shakes his head, reorienting all his strong features again. “I guess that’s that,” he says. In three days, Roger has aged years. Still he gets up and comes over to her and kisses her, a long hard kiss. Their dry lips grind together. She is kissing him back, but nothing is left and even Roger knows it.

  “OK,” he says automatically. “Leonard!” he yells. Leonard appears in the kitchen door, almost as drawn as Roger himself. “I want a drink,” Roger says. “Tell Marion I’m changing that coffee to bourbon, all right? Then tell her to go home.”

  “All right,” Leonard says. His big eyes go back and forth between Crystal and Roger.

  “Get Al on the phone,” Roger says. “Tell him I want him to drive Crystal over to Black Rock in the morning.”

  Leonard wets his lips. “In terms of the total picture,” he says, “I think you’re making a big mistake. She’s just overtired. She’ll be OK.”

  “I want Crystal to do whatever she wants to do. She’s never done that, I think,” Roger says, and both men stare at her for a second until they have to look away.

  “Right,” Leonard says. “I’ll get him.”

  “I want to drive,” Crystal says.

  “Tell him I want to follow Crystal’s car, just to make sure she gets there.”

  “Right,” Leonard says again.

  Crystal sits on the sofa until it disappears out from under her and there is nothing there at all and Leonard and Roger are talking and every now and then a leaf blows into the picture window while the wind blows in gusts outside, but she doesn’t hear them. She isn’t even listening, thinking back to the way the river was when she was little and the way it was even before she was born, the way her daddy said it was, remembering the lightning bugs in summer and the faded floral pattern, red and blue roses, on the rug in the hall upstairs in Nora and Grace’s house on Dry Fork. I will laugh I will sing and my heart will be gay. He liked to play blackjack so much. The yellow ghosts have long thin fingers just like wire, they don’t want to hurt you, though, nobody does. Stop, please. It was because of Iradell they put that stop light there. They will not see me stopping here, and in summer, in summer how the sun comes up so late it never hits the flowers until nearly noon. Crystal yawns.

  AGNES CAN’T GET OVER Crystal just coming home, smack in the middle of the campaign! It goes around and around in Agnes’s head. One day Crystal wasn’t there, the next day she was. This time she came home to stay. Roger Lee called and called, even though he told Lorene every time that it was the last time he was calling, but Crystal won’t go back to him. Roger Lee told Lorene that Crystal left all her diamond rings on the kitchen sink. Roger came over to Black Rock two times in his Lincoln Continental, but Crystal locked herself in the bathroom and wouldn’t talk to him, and the last time Odell went out and told Roger Lee please not to come back. There was a lot of publicity about it in the paper. Perfect strangers started calling up on the telephone, until Lorene got a new unlisted number and put an end to that. Finally it’s gotten so bad that Lorene is having nervous palpitations of the heart and Odell is worried sick, so Agnes walks over there herself to see what she can do.

  Crystal is lying back on the love seat in Lorene’s conversation area wearing a frilly old robe of her mother’s. She smokes and looks at the ceiling.

  “Well, hello there,” Agnes says. Agnes sits down in the rocker.

  “Hello, Agnes,” Crystal says. She doesn’t seem at all surprised to see her.

  Agnes rocks for a while.

  “Don’t you think you’d better go on home now and help Roger Lee run for Congress?” Agnes speaks up after she thinks she’s waited long enough.

  “He’ll do just fine,” Crystal says. Her voice is as flat as a pancake, Agnes notices.

  “What made you come home?” Agnes asks. Sure, she’s dying to know, but she thinks she might get at the trouble that way, too. Already Agnes is excited—she knows for a fact that Crystal has talked to her more so far than she has talked to anybody else since she came home. “What made you come?” Agnes asks again.

  Crystal raises her head and stares at Agnes, a dark stare which causes Agnes to shift nervously in the rocker.

  “Well, it’s hard to say, Agnes,” Crystal says in her strange flat voice. “I mean, there was this boy in the hospital. He was crazy, I guess, or something, and it turned out that he knew me.” Crystal’s words come rushing out at first, then slowly die and stop.

  “Huh!” Agnes snorts, unbelieving. “That’s not much of a reason, if you ask me. Besides, what if he did know you, that’s no big deal. He probably saw your picture in the paper, that’s all. It’s been in there enough.”

  But Crystal won’t talk anymore after that, so Agnes gives up and goes back home. Agnes can’t figure out why it upset Crystal so much, whether somebody knew her or whether they didn’t. Agnes bets she made the whole thing up in her head. It would be just like her to do that. Agnes’s mama is waiting right behind the screen door for the news, but Agnes walks past her without a word.

  “Well?” her mama asks, following Agnes into the living room. “Did you see her? What did she say?”

  “Nothing, Mama,” Agnes answers wearily. “Just a bunch of foolishness, that’s all.”

  THE NEXT DAY is when Crystal paralyzes herself. She just stops moving. She stops talking, stops doing everything. They take her in an ambulance to Charlottesville, and then they send her up to Johns Hopkins in a private plane, and then after a while they bring her back. The doctors can’t find any medical reason for it. They say it’s all in her mind. Lorene can’t see anything that the hospitals have to offer, either, that she can’t set up right at home.

  So Lorene puts Crystal upstairs in her old room and then she hires two practical nurses, Mrs. Dee and Mrs. Dixon. Mrs. Dee does the day shift and Mrs. Dixon does the night shift. That gives Mrs. Dixon some time in the day to work in her garden. Agnes opens a pizza parlor next door to her hardware store. Sykes’s wife Bunny has another baby and names him Odell, which tickles Odell to death. Neva has a hysterectomy. The river comes up again right next to the bottom of the bridge, and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers says that next time it might cover the courthouse steps and flo
od the whole town. Odell laughs at the engineers, along with everybody else, then he goes out and buys some flood insurance anyway, the maximum allowed by law. So does Agnes. Better safe than sorry, Agnes says. Babe moves to New York City, marries a stockbroker, and begins appearing regularly in a shampoo commercial on TV. Grace is in the hospital for two months with bronchial pneumonia, and after that they are able to convince Nora and Grace to sell out and take a small apartment downtown over the furniture store, where Grace starts failing fast. Devere is put into the home in Radford. Their old house is razed immediately, and a deep-shaft mine goes down right where it stood.

  And Roger Lee? Everybody felt so sorry for Roger Lee that he won that election hands down. Now he’s sponsoring a strip-mine bill. When ecology came in, Roger was right on top of it. He divorced Crystal quietly but continues to send a check every month to Lorene, who tears them up one by one. Lorene has turned against him finally, because she has no one else to blame.

  “I can take care of my own,” Lorene says. “I’ve always done it and I’ll keep doing it, no thanks to Mr. Big Shot.”

  “Now, now,” Odell says.

  But Lorene won’t have a thing to do with Roger Lee.

  Crystal just lies up there in that room every day, with her bed turned catty-corner so she could look out the window and see Lorene’s climbing rambler rose in full bloom on the trellis and the mountain all green beyond the railroad track if she would turn her head. But she won’t. She won’t lift a finger. She just lies there. Everybody in town takes a fancy to it. Crystal’s old uncle Garnett comes and sits with her, resting at each stop on the way up the stairs. Garnett reads the Bible to her, although there is no telling if she can hear it or not. Agnes’s mama goes up and sits with her, and Susie and Neva, and other ladies in town. People often bring congealed salads to Lorene because once Neva told somebody in the beauty shop that Crystal seems to like them. Crystal can eat, but she has to be fed. The only one she won’t eat for is Mrs. Dixon. Some people say why don’t they put her in a nursing home, but of course they won’t hear of it. “We make out just fine, thank you,” Lorene snaps. And truthfully there’s not a lot to do, provided Crystal is turned often enough so she doesn’t get bed sores. She’s no trouble lying there. After a while Lorene and Odell grow accustomed to it and they take a short cruise to the Bahamas. When they come back, everything is just the same as it was when they left. They begin planning a week in Spain.

  Agnes goes over there often and sometimes she thinks about how they used to play gin rummy and how they used to sit on the porch, and it strikes her as so sad. It’s pitiful how she just lies there. It’s a funny thing, but Crystal looks prettier than she ever did. Her hair is growing out and Neva keeps it fixed nice, and Agnes combs it, too, nearly every day. Agnes remembers how Crystal looked so pretty the night she won Miss Black Rock High. She helps Lorene put some of her trophies up where Crystal can see them. Agnes often thinks that if Crystal had married Roger Lee the first time he asked her, if she hadn’t gotten all that education and fallen in with hippies, she could be having intimate luncheons for people in Washington right now.

  But Agnes is glad she came home. Agnes talks to her a lot, and privately she thinks that Crystal can understand everything she says, even if she won’t make a sign. Every day when Agnes comes home from the store she goes over there and sits for a long time. It rests Agnes, sitting in that room, it’s so peaceful there. It’s always real clean and cool, and Lorene has gotten it fixed up so nice. Agnes tries to keep Crystal up to date: she tells her all about the Burger-O franchise she just bought, and she reads the newspaper to her and the Reader’s Digest. Agnes never reads her anything about Roger Lee, though. One day Agnes reads her “I Am Joe’s Nervous System” out of the Reader’s Digest, but Crystal’s eyelids don’t even flicker. A lot of times Agnes just sits and holds her hands, and sometimes she gives her a back rub.

  And who knows what will happen in this world? Agnes reflects. Who knows what the future holds? It is not given to us, as Jubal Thacker said just the other day on TV. Why, Crystal might jump right up from that bed tomorrow and go off and get her Ph.D. or do something else crazy. She’s just thirty-two now. Or Jubal might come and heal her. Or she might stay right here and atrophy to death. What Agnes really thinks, though, is that Crystal is happy, that she likes to have Agnes hold her hand and brush her hair, as outside her window the seasons come and go and the colors change on the mountain.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Lee Smith is the author of fifteen works of fiction, including Oral History, Fair and Tender Ladies, and her recent Mrs. Darcy and the Blue-Eyed Stranger. She has received many awards, including the North Carolina Award for Literature and an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; her novel The Last Girls was a New York Times bestseller as well as winner of the Southern Book Critics Circle Award. She lives in North Carolina.