Black Mountain Breakdown

by Lee Smith

  “And now, dear little children, who may this story read,

  To idle, silly, flattering words, I pray you ne’er give heed;

  Unto an evil counselor close heart, and ear, and eye,

  And take a lesson from this tale of the Spider and the Fly.”

  Crystal shivers and lets all her breath out in one long shuddering sigh.

  “You ought to be ashamed of yourself!” Lorene flings the door open and stands in silhouette as the kitchen light streams in behind her. Everybody blinks. “Scaring little girls like that! I don’t know what gets into you. Look at Crystal Renée, now she’s all wrought up, see what you’ve done, she probably won’t go to sleep for a week. Agnes, it’s time to go home. I just heard your mama call. Crystal, come on. It’s bedtime. You ought to be ashamed of yourself,” Lorene says again to Grant, who chuckles way back in his chair.

  “I’ll see you in the morning,” Agnes says, but Crystal feels dazed and only nods as Agnes leaves.

  “Good night, pumpkin,” Grant says.

  “Good night, Daddy,” Crystal tells him, leaning over the chair to kiss the top of his head before she follows her mother out.

  “Good night, Mama,” Crystal says and kisses her, too, and takes the jar of lightning bugs with her up the stairs, leaving Lorene alone in the kitchen to wrap up the Velveeta and put it back into the refrigerator, turn off the TV, wipe off her countertops with a damp rag. That done, Lorene goes to the door and pushes it open and sticks her head in.

  “You want anything?” she asks her husband. “I’m fixing to go to bed.”

  There is no answer from the room.

  “Grant?” she says more sharply. “Do you want anything? I’m fixing to go up now.”

  “Nothing, honey, thank you,” Grant says from his chair. “Good night.”

  Lorene closes the door and goes up the stairs to bed. Grant sleeps in the front room, on the sofa or sometimes in his chair, sometimes passed out and other times sleepless so that he wanders the house after the rest of them have gone to sleep. Lorene knows that Odell, Grant’s bastard half brother, buys the liquor for him and brings it when he comes, but she never see it and usually she never sees Odell either, since he comes late when she is asleep or while she’s gone to church or prayer meeting. When Lorene does see Odell, he holds his Caterpillar hat in his hands and mumbles down into the floor. He acts more like an animal than a man. But even if Odell isn’t smart, he is a hard worker, they say, and it wasn’t his fault they lost the mine. Lorene wonders where Sykes is now. She peers out the window at the highway when she pulls the blinds.

  All up and down the bottom it is dark except for the lights from an occasional car or truck on the road and the arc lights at the Esso station, which will be open all night, catering to truckers and men on the graveyard shift in the mines. If you go back up the road away from the town of Black Rock toward Richlands, after five or six miles you leave the Levisa River bottom and go into the Dismal River bottom and start climbing, following 460 up and up until you reach the bend of Dismal where the coke ovens are, nearly eight hundred of them, roaring and sending up smoke and red fire into the night. The coke ovens stretch in irregular lines along the Dismal River and then up the steep slopes, too, above the railroad track, and the sight of them is awesome, as vast and red and terrible as hell itself. The trees on the mountains around the coke ovens have long since died, their blackened shapes like ghosts of trees on the blackened hills. This is where the high-school students come to make out, parked along the old mine road off 460 above the bend where they have the best view.

  “Last year a seventeen-year-old boy fell down in one of them right there and they never did get him out or even find anything of him left. It was his second day on the job,” Sykes Spangler says, rubbing the breasts of the girl he is with, Marie Hicks.

  “Lord, that’s awful,” Marie says, turned to him, her face red and black, shadowed and fiery, close to his own.

  And Lorene pulls the window down against the cool night air, goes over to her dresser and applies some astringent. Directly below her, Grant sleeps already in his chair. His arm dangles over the side, fingers open and limp hanging down. Crystal lies flat on her back in her bed, while the jar of lightning bugs blinks softly on her dresser. Crystal listens to all the creaking sounds of her house, Grant’s low rattling snore from downstairs, her mother clicking bottles together, then flushing the toilet, then the bedsprings creaking, a truck now and then on the road, the frogs singing rivets up from the river, loud and full through her open window which faces the river and Black Mountain out to the back. Come into my parlor said the spider to the fly. Crystal shivers and pulls the sheet up tight to her chin. It’s the prettiest little parlor that ever you did spy. The jar of lightning bugs casts a soft, weird, flickering light on the wallpaper and Crystal watches it until she falls asleep.

  * * *

  LORENE WORKS IN the kitchen while Sykes loads his car. She opens the refrigerator door, throws out leftovers, waters the African violets on the windowsill—but this is nothing, make-work, to take her mind off the fact which she cannot get it off of today: Sykes’s leaving. When the clock radio woke her up this morning it came into her mind first thing. Sykes is leaving. Lorene wears black polyester pants, a black-and-white sleeveless overblouse which looks like silk, black sandals. Her broad toenails are painted Florida Rose. Somehow Lorene has wanted to look extra nice today, leave a memory, sensing perhaps that nothing will ever impress itself on Sykes.

  Sykes staggers up and down the stairs and out the kitchen door carrying load after load. Lorene doesn’t say a word about the flies. Sykes is packing his record player, a radio, records, his weights, clothes, everything. There has never been much of him here, and now nothing at all will be left. Sykes wears a cowboy hat and khaki pants. His chest and back muscles bulge as he carries the things. Lorene, seeing him now in this new going-away light more clearly than before, looks at him hard, tries to memorize his body. The muscles astonish her. What has he been building himself up for?

  Sykes has let his hair grow out of the flat top he wore for years. It comes a little below his ears, black and straight, the way Grant’s used to be. He looks like a pirate or an outlaw. Girls are crazy about him. He also looks a lot like his father. Sykes has black eyes which are a little off center. They never quite focus on anything at the same time, but the doctors have said there is nothing really wrong with them. He has Grant’s hawk nose and a wide mouth which wears, when he wants it to, a lopsided irresistible grin.

  Finally he gets the car loaded, his blue Buick Sprint. Sykes totaled two cars before they sent him off to military school at Union Springs, where he couldn’t have one at all. Lorene remembers going to meet him at the train station in Bluefield the first time he came home from there, seeing Sykes in dark glasses come tapping with a cane down the steps of the train with a German Shepherd dog on a leash. Why, she almost had heart failure! A blind boy for a son! But it was only Sykes pretending, so he could bring that dog home on the train. And then she had to keep it for him when he went back to school, until it was hit by a coal truck. Out the window Lorene sees Sykes slam down the trunk of his car and start back toward the house. She feels funny, a hot flash.

  “I think you ought to put on a shirt,” she says.

  “Oh Mama.” Sykes grins at her.

  “Well, you can’t just go off to college like that.”

  “Mama, it’s only summer school. I’m not even going to live in a dorm.”

  Lorene has misgivings about that, too. “Well,” she says, “it just doesn’t look good to go without a shirt. You know what I mean.”

  Sykes goes and gets a blue shirt and puts it on to end the argument. He can always take it off later in the car.

  Coming back down, he sneaks up behind Lorene and grabs her. “Gotcha!” he says.

  “Oh Sykes, don’t do that, for goodness’ sakes, you scared me to death!” But Lorene is not angry at all. It’s hard to be angry with Sykes, who does what he
wants to and leaves everyone else alone, sliding through Lorene’s hands like something with grease on it so that there’s nothing for her to grab onto.

  “Let me pack you a lunch,” she says.

  “Mama, come on. I’ve got to get on the road. You haven’t packed me a lunch in ten years.”

  “Oh.” Lorene is silent. Has it really been that long? But Sykes has grown up in the houses of his friends, in poolhalls, off hunting, at the drag strip at Cedar Bluff, everywhere but here.

  “You study, now,” she says brightly. “You know you’ll have to study, Sykes.”

  “Oh sure, Mama,” He grins so big that Lorene can’t tell if he will or not. If he does, it’ll be the first time.

  “I’ll see you, Mama,” says Sykes. “I’ll call you up Sunday night.”

  “You’ll have to tell Crystal goodbye,” says Lorene.

  “Where is she?” Sykes shifts from foot to foot, annoyed.

  “Over at Nancy’s, I think.”

  “Well, you tell her for me, Mama,” Sykes says. “I’ve got to go.”

  “Your father,” Lorene says. “You’ll have to tell your father goodbye.”

  “He won’t even know whether I tell him or not.”

  “He might,” Lorene says. “You never know.”

  “I’m in a hurry,” Sykes says. “I told Bobby I’d pick him up at noon in Richlands, and it’s twelve-thirty already.”

  “Go tell your father goodbye.”

  Sykes gives her a look she knows very well, the look which means that Sykes won’t do anything he doesn’t want to do, ever, that he is doing this only to humor her, and goes into the closed front room. In a minute he’s back out.

  “Well?” she asks.

  “Well what? I’ll call you Sunday night.”

  “I’ve got some tuna salad,” Lorene says.

  “Mama.” Sykes gives her a big hug and then he’s gone, spinning out in the loose gravel at the end of the drive.

  Sykes has left Grant’s door open, and when she goes to close it Lorene sees Grant sitting straight up in his chair.

  “Honey?” he says, rasping out the word. “Honey?” but it isn’t clear who he’s calling. Maybe her but more likely Crystal; he wants Crystal all the time now. Lorene shuts the door before he has a chance to see her.

  Then, since nobody else is there, Lorene sits down at the kitchen table and cries. “Honey?” Grant calls again, several times, behind the door. It’s so hard, Lorene thinks. So hard. Like Jules, for instance. Neva always swears if they hadn’t named him Jules he wouldn’t have turned out like he has, wouldn’t have been born so quiet and smart with his eyes set only on distance, always horsing to leave. But then Sykes doesn’t act like Sykes, is neither industrious nor practical. In fact Sykes acts kind of crazy, and Lorene doesn’t know what will become of him, what he will do with this life she and Grant have given him which he doesn’t want much anyhow, to judge from the daredevil things he does. She remembers in seventh grade when he blew himself up with gunpowder, one hand a red pulpy mess bleeding into the towel while they drove him to the Clinch Valley Clinic at Richlands, Grant taking the curves so fast. But Lorene can’t remember a time when Sykes wasn’t into some kind of trouble. Even when he was in the nursery-school Bible class at church, that little, he took things. Stole the snake out of the handmade Garden of Eden set that Mr. Pritchard had carved for the church. Everybody was looking for it at church and then one day at home Lorene found it, when she was cleaning under Sykes’s bed. It’s a gun, Sykes had said, pointing the carved wooden snake at her head. And Sykes used to wiggle so much when he was little. He wouldn’t sit still for anything, wouldn’t mind at all. Jules always minded and Lorene didn’t know what to do with Sykes. From the time he opened the door he was gone.

  Lorene remembers a time three years ago when Sykes was fifteen and the river flooded, the big flood of ’55. Sykes got into somebody’s boat and rode the flood from Little Prater all the way downtown where people were lined up all across the bridge and along the river to see him. Somebody had called Lorene and she went, too, nervous inside, embarrassed at the crowd on the bridge. When Sykes came around the bend, grinning and waving from the bucking boat in the middle of the brown swirling flood, she had to laugh and cheer with the rest of them. It was so outrageous to ride a flood. But Sykes was like that, and of course he wrecked that boat.

  She hopes he will study, but she doubts it; it’s her rivet money he’s going on, of course. Like a lot of people around Black Rock who never had one, Lorene has great faith in the power of what she calls a “good education,” not realizing yet that the children you work so hard to send out will probably never come back, or will come back all changed and ashamed of you, with new ideas of their own. Jules was already different before he left, so his is not a case in point. Anyway, Lorene is proud of that big degree of his even if he has been known to hang up the phone when she calls. Sykes and Crystal will have one, too: a good education. VPI was the only place Sykes could get into, but you can’t ever tell. He might take to it yet. Every cloud has a silver lining, Lorene reminds herself. Faith can move mountains. But probably Neva is right and there’s only so much you can do with a boy.

  When Sykes got a new toy, the first thing he’d do was try to take it apart. But when Crystal got one, she held it up to the light and turned it this way and that. Lorene feels completely lost in her kitchen with Sykes gone and Crystal off playing at Nancy’s; for a minute it’s as if she never had children at all. I could be a registered nurse, she thinks. I could start a little dress shop downtown. But then Lorene sits straight up, thinking of Garnett’s sermon last week about the little house by the side of the road. She shakes her head slowly and decisively back and forth, like a swimmer coming up from under the water. It’s not noon yet. She has things to do. And anyway she’s not through with Crystal; Crystal is still at home.

  ONE SUNDAY CRYSTAL goes up to spend the night with her aunt Nora Green and her aunt Grace Green Hibbitts (who are her great-aunts, actually) and her uncle Devere Spangler, up at the old Spangler home place on Dry Fork of Six-and-Twenty-Mile Branch. Crystal visits them often and Lorene doesn’t mind her going. Lorene has always gotten along fine with Grant’s family, much better than Grant ever did. Crystal loves to go up there, but she hates it a little bit, too, and the same lump comes up in her throat every time they round that last bend, the curve where the Halloways’ grocery store is. Crystal and Lorene bounce in the front seat of Lorene’s white Pontiac, and Crystal’s overnight bag bounces by itself in the back. The road grows narrower and narrower. Every time Lorene hits the shoulder, she raises a cloud of dust which hangs in the air until they are gone around the next curve and Crystal can’t see it anymore.

  “This road is getting awful,” Lorene remarks, impersonal behind her sunglasses. “I hope they fix it before winter comes.” Lorene always heralds the approach of any new season as if it were a person: “Spring is late this year” or “Fall is on the way.” Crystal sits still and looks while the road climbs up closer and closer to the West Virginia line and they drive it, steep dusty green mountainside on their left and then a sheer drop down into Dry Fork Creek on the right. The big gray stone gates rise up ahead, anachronistic, a monument to her grandfather’s colossal vanity. It’s like entering a book. LITTLE EMMA MINING CO. is engraved on the smooth stone in the center of the arch. Lorene turns off the main road and drives under the arch.

  Crystal tries to imagine it as it was once, in the thirties maybe, when her grandfather Iradell Spangler was living out his vision of grandeur here and running things in his crazy, flamboyant fashion, and the two tipples were operating around the clock and they were bringing coal out of the big drift mine at the Little Emma and all the other shafts that went out from it and shot through the mountains until it was like a honeycomb under there. That whole opposite hillside was full of identical green wooden houses where the miners lived with their families, and on that side, too, was the company store. Crystal has heard them talk a
bout Iradell and how he wouldn’t let the union in and wouldn’t modernize his mine, how he himself perversely engineered the long fall of the Little Emma, which was finished finally sometime after his death. Now the company houses that are left are crumbling, and vines grow up through their floors. One tipple has caved in and the other is ready to go. Long since, Odell sold the machinery and scrapped the company store and most of the houses for lumber, so that everywhere up this holler there are half-overgrown roads leading noplace, pieces of falling-down structures, and POSTED and NO TRESPASSING signs tacked up to tree after tree. Lorene drives past the family graveyard on the left, where Little Emma herself, Crystal’s grandmother, lies beneath the columned monstrosity, a little Greek temple of sorts, which Iradell had constructed there. One truck mine still operates, and a coal truck comes rumbling now from a road to their right and passes them, the dusty-faced driver waving his hand. Tennessee Nights is the name stenciled across the top of the bed of the truck.

  “Who is that?” Crystal asks.

  “One of Odell’s people, Johnny Goff probably,” Lorene answers absently, negotiating a pothole in the road. Crystal knows that Odell, Iradell’s illegitimate son by Mae Peacock, lives alone in a little house up that road, and a bunch of redheaded Goffs live up there, too. But Crystal has never been there. They are close enough now so that Crystal can hear Devere’s dogs barking, and then Lorene brakes to a stop by the tin mailbox.

  “Here, honey,” Lorene says, getting out to open the mailbox, “take this to your aunt Nora, it’s still here from yesterday.” She puts a pile of mail into Crystal’s left hand and her overnight bag in the other hand and gives her a kiss on the cheek. “I can’t come in!” Lorene calls before anybody has a chance to ask her, waving to Nora, who has appeared at the door. Then Lorene jumps back into the car and pulls out in a cloud of dust, already late for a meeting.

  “Law, honey, I’m glad to see you,” Aunt Nora calls, stepping outside the screen door and wiping her face with her apron. “Shoo!” she says, flapping her apron back down at the chickens which come pecking around at her feet. “Shoo, now, I ain’t got nothing for you.”