Black Mountain Breakdown

by Lee Smith

  PRAISE FOR

  Black Mountain Breakdown

  “Black Mountain Breakdown is like a country song. It is true and real; it is loving and sad; it has a country song’s vividness, humor, sorrow, and real-life power.”

  — Annie Dillard

  “Oh lord, what a funny, sweet, dreamy, precise, scary book…. The closest thing to reading this would be reading Madame Bovary while listening to Loretta Lynn.”

  — Roy Blount, Jr.

  “The most evocative book I have read in a long time… Funny, tragic and haunting.”

  —Mary Lee Settle

  Berkley titles by Lee Smith

  THE DEVIL’S DREAM

  FAIR AND TENDER LADIES

  ORAL HISTORY

  BLACK MOUNTAIN BREAKDOWN

  Black

  Mountain

  Breakdown

  LEE SMITH

  THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) • Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England • Penguin Group Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd.) • Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty. Ltd.) • Penguin Books India Pvt. Ltd., 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi—110 017, India • Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, Auckland 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd.) • Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty.) Ltd., 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  Copyright © 1980 by Lee Smith.

  Cover art: Farmhouse copyright © by Punchstock. Cover design by Royce M. Becker.

  Interior text design by Tiffany Estreicher.

  “I’m Thinking Tonight of My Blue Eyes,” by A. P. Carter copyright © 1929 and 1930 by Peer International Corporation. Copyrights renewed by Peer International Corporation. Used by permission.

  All rights reserved.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or

  electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of

  copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  BERKLEY® is a registered trademark of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  The “B” design is a trademark of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  PUBLISHING HISTORY

  G. P. Putnam’s Sons hardcover edition / January 1980

  Ballantine trade paperback edition / August 1996

  Berkley trade paperback edition / March 2012

  Berkley trade paperback ISBN: 978-1-101-56064-8

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the G. P. Putnam’s Sons hardcover edition as follows:

  Smith, Lee, 1944–

  Black Mountain breakdown / Lee Smith.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 0-399-012531-0

  1. Teenage girls—Fiction. 2. Fathers—Death—Fiction. 3. Virginia—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3569.M5376B5 1980

  813′.54 80017993

  PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  ALWAYS LEARNING

  PEARSON

  I have used the old family names, the actual place names, and some of the legends and history of Buchanan County, Virginia, in this novel. For much of this information, I am indebted to Nancy Virginia Baker’s book, Bountiful and Beautiful: A Bicentennial History of Buchanan County, Virginia, 1776–1976, printed at the Buchanan County Vocational School; and to many items which have appeared over the years in The Virginia Mountaineer, especially the weekly “Lore and Legend” column by Sam Varney, Jr. In the latter portion of the novel, I use some direct quotations from the unpublished memoirs of my ancestor Charlotte Field, born in 1842 on the Eastern Shore of Virginia. All characters in this novel are entirely fictitious.

  This novel is loosely based upon my story “Paralyzed: A True Story,” which appeared in the Southern women’s issue of Southern Exposure, spring 1977. Another portion of the novel appeared in the winter issue of the Carolina Quarterly.

  I am indebted to Margaret Ketchum for her editing skills and constant encouragement.

  For Jim, with love

  Table of Contents

  I

  II

  III

  I

  NOW THE LIGHTNING bugs come up from the mossy ground along the river bank, first one, then two together, more, hesitant at first, from the darkness gathered there already in the brush beneath the trees. Crystal sits and watches, holds her breath, the Mason jar beside her knee; if she looks down, she can’t even see it now. She touches it with her finger and feels the glass with the letters raised and indecipherable in the dimness so that they could be anything, any words at all. They could be French. Suddenly out of the scrub grass at her knees comes rising a small pale flickering light, sickly unearthly yellowish green, fairy light. It is so close she can breathe on it and see the whirring, tiny wings. Crystal doesn’t move. She could catch it, but she doesn’t. Only her eyes move to follow the flight, erratic at first as if blown by wind although there is no wind in the hot still damp of early June on the river bank, then up into the dark branches, away and gone. Crystal can barely see the river on down the bank, barely hear it. She looks across the river bed now to the railroad track cut into the mountain which goes straight up on the other side, almost perpendicular, impenetrable, too steep for houses or even trails: Black Mountain. Its rocky top makes a jagged black hump across the sky and it is surprisingly light that far up in the sky, but the river bottom lies deep in the mountain’s shadow and even in Crystal’s yard now and in Agnes’s yard next door and on Highway 460 in front of the house it is dark. Cars have got their lights on.

  “You get any yet?”

  Crystal jumps, even though she knows it’s only Agnes, and, standing up, she knocks over her jar and has to bend down to get it.

  “Come on,” Agnes says. “I’ve been waiting for you over at the house. I thought that was what we said, after supper at my house. What are you doing out here anyway?” Even now, at twelve, Agnes has a flat and nasal, curious voice.

  “I’m coming,” Crystal says, pulling beggar-lice off the back of her shorts. She hates to leave the river. Beside it in the dark, she can think it is like her daddy told her it used to be, not flat and dried out and little, but big and wide and full of water. The Levisa River. With huge log rafts on it floating down through the mountains in spring and early summer to the sawmills in Catlettsburg, Kentucky. Sometimes men rode those logs all the way, Daddy said. In the 1920s. Just sitting and floating, it would take days, watching the land coming at you on either side like a dream, the green trees hanging into the water, not ever knowing what would be around a bend. Seeing animals, too. Daddy said these hills were full of animals then, all kinds. Maybe see a panther. And the water would be clear with fish in it. You could see straight to the bottom. Now the water is black because they wash coal in it upriver, at the
Island Creek tipple at Vansant. And the coal dust sinks to the bottom and covers the rocks so they are black, too. The real black rock, the one Daddy said they named the town for, doesn’t even exist anymore. It used to hang way out over a swimming hole near Hoot Owl and everybody jumped from it and two people drowned in that hole. But when the Norfolk and Western came through in the thirties and built the railroad, they blasted the rock into little bitty pieces and it fell into the river and was gone. Probably you could find a piece of it now, in the river by Hoot Owl, if you knew where to look.

  “I’m going on.” Agnes is mad. “I don’t like it here.”

  “Why not?” Crystal asks. She turns her head toward the yard, and Agnes, and sees that Agnes has already got a bunch of lightning bugs in her jar. Captive and pulsing, they cast a soft irregular glow like the twinkle lights last winter on her aunts’ Christmas tree.

  “Booger man might get us,” Agnes says scornfully. She is not scared of any booger man herself, but she knows Crystal is or anyway used to be. “I’ve got better things to do than stand out here in some old trees and get a cold.” Agnes sounds like Lorene, Crystal’s mother.

  Agnes goes up the bank and Crystal follows, still picking off beggar-lice because she knows how mad her mother will get if she comes in with them still all over her shorts.

  At the edge of the back yards Crystal can see their neighborhood all stretched out along the road. Lights shine at the back of every house, in the kitchens where the women are finishing up. Sometimes the black shadow of a woman’s head crosses a kitchen window for a minute and then vanishes. Agnes’s mama’s shadow stays firmly there in her lighted square. That’s where their sink is, by the window. In the front rooms, the televisions are on and the men are watching TV or reading the paper, tired. But not at her house. Crystal knows what’s happening there. And sometimes she wishes she lived in one of these other houses, where probably some of the men have gone to sleep already, stretched out in reclining chairs. The Varney boys, Horn and Daris, who are older, have got a big light on in their driveway and they are out there working on a car. That’s what they do all the time. Their yard is full of parts of cars. Still they are good boys: Horn was the quarterback last year at Black Rock High, and they are Eagle Scouts. Crystal would like to have the Varney boys for brothers, grease-stained and open and grinning all the time. Not like her own: Jules, who is so old she doesn’t even know him, he’s just thin and furious when he’s home which is almost never now, off teaching in a college; or Sykes, plain ornery, her mother says, always up to something, so they sent him off to military school at Union Springs and that didn’t do any good at all except to make him more secretive about what he’s up to. Tomorrow he’s going to summer school at VPI. Idly, Crystal wonders where he is now. His window is dark. But she doesn’t really care. The way he treats her daddy, she will be glad when he’s gone for good.

  “Get that one,” Agnes says. “Go on.”

  Crystal catches it and puts it into her jar and screws the top back on. It looks lonesome in there by itself and so she catches another one and then another and some more, and by then they are in Agnes’s back yard by the clothesline, close enough to hear Jubal Thacker’s daddy picking his guitar on his back porch beyond the Thackers’ garden. He’s doing “Wildwood Flower,” Crystal realizes as she goes up the steps, doing it slow, with the music floating out soft and a little bit sad in the green June night across all the back yards.

  I will laugh, I will sing, and my heart will be gay.

  A light bulb hangs down low over Agnes’s kitchen table and it makes Crystal blink. With her finger she traces a pattern on the red oilcloth and looks in the open door through the dining room which is almost never used and into the living room where the television is on and Agnes’s family is sitting around.

  Agnes’s father, Hassell McClanahan, a fat red-faced man, is shining shoes. He runs the hardware store downtown and he has his shoes all spread out on newspaper to shine them. “Hello there, Crystal,” he calls. He has a big smile and a big rough friendly voice, his customer smile and voice which he has used so much in the hardware store that they come natural now. Agnes’s mama is fat, too. She is sewing something all the time. It is through her that Crystal is somehow related to Agnes, because Agnes’s mama was a Hibbitts, but Crystal isn’t sure how it works.

  “You sure you don’t want some?” Agnes says. “This is real good buttermilk.”

  “We just had supper before I came out,” Crystal says.

  “That was a long time ago. That was hours,” Agnes says. As usual she is right.

  Agnes puts a blue bowl on the table with a thick square of cornbread in it, then pours buttermilk over the cornbread and into the bowl. She gets a spoon and sits down to eat. Crystal is looking through a Life magazine that she got from a pile of magazines on one end of the big table. She stops at some pictures of Mexico.

  “I’d like to go there,” she says, pointing.

  “Not me,” declares Agnes. “You can’t drink the water. Gives you diarrhea all the time.”

  “Well,” Crystal says.

  “I want to go to Lookout Mountain, Tennessee,” says Agnes’s little sister Pauletta, who has recently changed her name to Babe, dancing in on the plastic runner which goes from the living room through the dining room to protect the beige wall-to-wall carpet. Babe, at ten, is a showoff and old for her age. But Crystal likes her. Babe is plump, too, but she has curly red hair and giggles a lot.

  “What are you all fixed up for?” Agnes says, wiping her mouth.

  “Mama doesn’t care,” says Babe. She is wearing dark-red lipstick and has used it on her cheeks, too, for rouge, and over her T-shirt she has a long double strand of imitation pearls, one pink, one blue. “Watch this,” she says. She does a tap dance step that she has seen on TV, which ends by Babe slapping her foot behind her back with her hand.

  “That’s pretty good,” Crystal says.

  “I know it,” says Babe.

  “Huh,” Agnes says.

  Babe gets a Coke from the refrigerator and shakes it up to make it fizz, then opens it and sticks the whole top into her mouth, so that some of the fizz runs down her chin and gets on the pearls.

  “You all want to watch The Dating Game?” Babe asks.

  “I don’t think so,” Crystal says. Now she is looking at pictures of California. “I’ve got to go home in a minute.”

  “You know who I’d like to have a date with?” Babe says. “Frankie AV-a-lon, that’s who. See you around, clowns.” She shakes up the Coke some more on her way back to the living room. Agnes’s mama’s head is bent and she sews.

  Crystal laughs.

  “What’s so funny?” Agnes says.

  “Pauletta. I mean Babe.”

  “If you had to live with her twenty-four hours every day you wouldn’t think she’s so funny,” Agnes says, licking the back of her spoon. She takes the blue bowl over and puts it into the sink.

  “Well, maybe,” Crystal says.

  Crystal and Agnes are almost exactly the same age, one month apart. Agnes was born at home, in the room upstairs which is her room still, but Crystal was born in the Clinch Valley Hospital in Richlands, Virginia, because her mother had to have a Caesarean. Crystal is blond and fair, with features so fine they don’t look real sometimes; she looks like an old-fashioned painting of a girl, but the color comes and goes in her cheeks. Now, at twelve, she is thin and awkward, all bones and angles, but sometimes already people will stop and stare at her downtown. Crystal is not beautiful yet, but it is clear that she will be. The reason they stare is that already she looks so different. Her face is unusual here. She doesn’t look like a Spangler, her father’s people, or a Sykes, either one. She doesn’t look like anybody else in Black Rock, and her eyes in particular are strange, a dark intense blue, dreaming and distant as she walks holding hands with her girl friends after school, always in a gaggle of girls, always somehow clearly separate among them. Agnes is there, too, these days, wherever Crystal is.
Agnes is heavy and red-haired like any McClanahan, but her hair is curly and light-colored, sandy, and she has a broad flat nose (“nigger nose,” Chester Lester taunts, although he has never seen a Negro in his life) and a small, pursed mouth. She is always elected treasurer of her class. Agnes can take care of herself, but she is not sure that Crystal can. Crystal seems to lack something, some hard thing inside her that Agnes and Babe were born with. Agnes watches out for Crystal, and they are best friends, of course. They do everything together. (Once Crystal got her foot stuck in the old cattle guard at the end of Agnes’s driveway when they were walking up to the Esso station for a Milky Way, and Agnes put her own foot in and got it stuck there, too, until Mr. Thacker came out with a crowbar and pried them loose.)

  Now Agnes and Crystal go out into the front yard and catch lightning bugs until they are tired of it and the jars are full, and then they sit together on the porch swing and put the jars on the little table before them, fantastic lanterns, while beyond the climbing clematis vine on the porch posts and beyond the little yard the traffic goes by on the road. They rock the swing. They sit out here a lot, because of the way things are over at Crystal’s house.

  If they want to talk they have to talk loud, over the noise of the traffic, because the road is not far from the front of these houses although the back yards are sizable, big enough for gardens, vast for children. And there is a lot of traffic: 460 is the only real road that runs through these mountains, going from Richlands, Virginia, up into the Black Rock area, following first the Dismal River and then the Levisa, winding and climbing up and then back down into Pikeville, Kentucky. There are other roads going up the hollers, some paved and some not, depending on how many people live up them. Houses everywhere are close to the roads because anything resembling flat land is so hard to come by, must be bulldozed out and created.

  Crystal sees the map of this country in her mind; she has studied it in school. A ragged diamond shape. Heavily inhabited where it is inhabited, with people piled up all along the creeks while whole mountains and mountainsides go empty and wild. Crystal rocks and thinks about the wild places, how it would be there. They say that the first man who ever settled in this country was a trapper named Stigner who lived in a big hollow tree up near the bend of Slate Creek. Of course it would not have been Slate Creek then, Crystal reminds herself. There was no coal and so there would have been no slate either, just a big creek without a name and a hollow tree there, cut out by lightning perhaps.