Black Mountain Breakdown

by Lee Smith

  Touching the chair rail all around the room, she moves to the window and stands looking out for a long time, her fingers on the sill. Again and again she traces the initials carved deep in the wood. W.G.S. William Grant Spangler. Her father’s initials, and he must have carved them there, must have stood sometime at this window where she is standing now, with a new sharp knife, young then, maybe just a boy her own age, leaving his mark. She wonders what he was thinking about when he carved those initials. W.G.S. Crystal thinks of her father as a boy passing through this house, walking up the stairs. But now her father is a grown man; that boy is dead. W.G.S. is dead whoever he was who carved these initials here, and she thinks of all the other people, of Grant and Devere as little children, of Mae Peacock, of bleeding Emma, of big rough Iradell and all the others who have passed through this house, sat on this furniture, breathed this air and slept in this bed and used this space she is using now. And in ten years she will be dead, too, the Crystal who stands here now, this Crystal up so late in the night. She’ll be so different, all grown up and changed. Who will she be then? Who? The dogs are barking loud now. They have heard something off in the woods. The yellow ghosts have thin long fingers just like wire, but Crystal holds on to the wood.

  * * *

  “HOW LONG is this going to take?” Crystal asks as politely as she can. She sits on a straight-backed kitchen chair in the conversation area of Lorene’s kitchen, surrounded by women. They have poked holes into an old tight-fitting aqua rubber bathing cap and put it on Crystal’s head. Now Lorene and Neva are into the slow process of pulling Crystal’s hair up through the holes with long silver crochet hooks, jabbing them down into each hole and then jerking, the slow pull up until a whole long strand of hair emerges. It is incredibly painful, especially around the temples and the ears. Susie Sykes, Neva and Lorene’s youngest brother’s wife, rocks in the rocker, giving her baby a bottle. The baby is a two-month-old boy named Denny. Her aunt Susie keeps Denny so dressed up that Crystal has never yet really seen what he looks like. Days of Our Lives, which Lorene watches every day, has just come on television, and every now and then the women pause in their conversation to see what’s going on in Meadville and then resume, jabbing and pulling and talking, while Neva’s cigarette burns itself out in the ashtray and Crystal bites her lip. Neva lights cigarettes and lets them burn out. It’s hot and getting hotter in the kitchen, damp August heat that makes it hard to do anything active or even breathe.

  Every morning Crystal plays a private game, trying to guess what kind of day it will be. She has plenty of time to guess, because the sun doesn’t come up until ten o’clock or so. It comes up, that is, but it only hits the mountaintops and never makes it down into the bottom until ten or eleven o’clock. If Crystal has guessed pretty day, and it is, she buys herself a Coke at the Esso station. If she guesses wrong, she has to pay a penalty, but these penalties vary from day to day. One time it was clean up her room. Another time it was be nice to Chester Lester. It depends.

  “Crystal, honey, turn your head over this way a little bit,” Neva directs. Crystal turns her head. Her eyes are on a level with Neva’s armpits and she sees a wide wet patch of perspiration on the blue uniform; Crystal sniffs but it doesn’t smell. Lorene always says that horses sweat, men perspire, and women glow. But Neva sweats. Neva looks a lot like Lorene, but she is larger all over, a big-boned energetic woman. This year her hair is auburn red.

  “I cannot go on like this!” says a beautiful woman in Meadville, clutching at a doctor in a hospital corridor. “Let me tell Gregory! We cannot live this way. Always meeting in secret—the motels, the deceitful lies. It’s killing me.”

  “You must calm yourself, Karen,” the doctor says dispassionately, looking quickly up and down the hospital corridor to see if anyone has heard. “Remember my position. Remember your own. Besides, there is something I must tell you.” He smooths his white coat.

  “Let me tell Gregory, please! We could live together, Paul! Who cares what people think?”

  “Darling,” the doctor says rapidly, “we will discuss this at another time. Just now there is something I have to tell you. It is not good news. I want you to brace yourself, Karen. Are you ready?”

  Karen gulps and bats her eyelashes tremulously. It’s clear that she is not ready at all.

  “The test results from your physical have come back, darling, and I regret to say they indicate that you may have a—”

  Organ chords crash and a commercial for Oxydol appears.

  “Well, shoot!” Lorene says.

  “I bet she’s got a malignant tumor,” Neva says, jabbing.

  “She might,” Lorene admits. “You know she hasn’t been feeling so good. But I thought it was just nerves.”

  “Maybe she’s pregnant,” says Susie, tilting Denny’s bottle up so he can get it all.

  “I don’t think I can stand this anymore,” Crystal says suddenly, surprising everyone including herself. Usually she has such nice manners. “It really hurts.”

  “That’s because we’re around your face right now, honey,” Neva soothes her. “We’ll be all through in a minute. Go get her some aspirin, Lorene.”

  Lorene gets a glass of water and two aspirins and Crystal takes them. Through the screen door she sees Babe in a two-piece red bathing suit, playing in the sprinkler. Jubal Thacker rides by on his bike. Crystal would give anything to be out there. August. She can’t believe that the summer has come and gone so fast and now she can’t even remember what she did with it, long days out riding her bike, reading, going to the movies with Agnes every time the picture changed downtown. Just sitting, mostly, in different places: by the river, on the back steps, on Agnes’s front porch. Mooning, her mother calls it. But she wasn’t mooning. She was biding her time. Only now that it’s August that time is nearly up, and she can’t imagine why she agreed to have her hair streaked in the first place. She would rather be out in that sprinkler with Babe.

  “Well,” Susie says, standing up and giving her pedal pushers a hitch, “if you all don’t mind, I think I’ll leave Denny right here on this blanket on the floor, he’s sleeping so good, while I run on down to the Piggly Wiggly and do my shopping. You don’t mind, do you?” She’s asking Lorene, but her eyes travel nervously back and forth between the two women.

  “No, honey, you go ahead,” Lorene says. Susie’s out the door in no time flat.

  “I knew she was going to do that,” Neva says.

  “Well, but you know how it is being cooped up in the house with a real little one,” Lorene says, “and Edwin don’t do a thing to help out.”

  “Those big kids could help her a lot if they weren’t spoiled rotten,” Neva goes on. “I told her about that. You could see it coming as plain as the nose on your face. But you can’t tell Susie anything, she knows it all.”

  “Edwin could have done worse,” Lorene remarks, and Neva says, “I guess so.”

  “What do you mean, you spent the night at your friend’s house? You don’t have any friends. That’s a miserable lie,” cries Mrs. Bennett in Meadville. “Sandra, answer me.”

  Sandra, a long-haired skinny teenager, rushes up a flight of stairs. Mrs. Bennett goes into the bathroom and takes a pill.

  “If you give them an inch they take a mile,” Neva says to no one in particular. “OK, honey,” she says to Crystal, “now shut your eyes while I put this on.” Neva pulls on her rubber gloves and mixes up some terrible-smelling purple solution and spreads it over all the hair that the women have pulled through the cap.

  “Can Crystal come out now?” Agnes is at the screen door sun-blinded, trying to see in.

  “No, she can’t,” Lorene says. “She won’t be done for a long time. How long, Neva?”

  “Depends on how fast she turns. Hour and a half, anyway. I’ve got to wash it and roll it up after this.”

  “I can’t breathe,” Crystal says.

  “Run along, Agnes. You can see Crystal after a while,” Lorene says just as Denny starts crying
and she has to pick him up.

  Agnes disappears and Lorene sits down in the rocker with Denny.

  “Anyway,” Neva goes on, back to an earlier conversation they were having before Susie came in, ”don’t you breathe this to a soul, but they say you can hear her screaming every time you go around that curve at night, right by the big pine, that one with the split top was the one she crashed at.”

  “I don’t believe a word of that,” Lorene says.

  “What? What?” Crystal’s voice is muffled by the towel around her face.

  “I’m just telling you what I heard. I’m not saying if it’s true or if it isn’t. But you know as well as I do, if you die in an upset frame of mind your spirit don’t just lie down.”

  “Who?” Crystal asks.

  “Nothing, honey,” Neva tells her, and takes Crystal over to the sink. “Turned out good,” she announces in a minute, fingering the squeaky pinkish strands of hair.

  “Why, that looks awful!” Lorene almost drops the baby and he starts to cry again.

  “Well, it’s got to have a toner on it,” Neva says. “It won’t look like anything till you get a toner on it.”

  “What does it look like now?” Crystal asks.

  “What did the doctor say?” Neva has pulled off the cap and now she’s washing Crystal’s hair, kneading the scalp with her knuckles, holding her head under the faucet. Neva nods her head at Grant’s closed door.

  “Said there’s five stages of emphysema and he’s in the last part of number four,” Lorene answers, glad that the doctor came and went and that she has a big name to put to Grant’s illness now, whether it’s the right one or not.

  “Lord, Lord,” Neva says.

  “Who—Daddy?” Crystal tries to ask through the towel, but the women are watching TV because Karen is telling Gregory everything. Crystal thinks about that time in August two or three years ago, when her daddy took her over to the miniature golf course at Richlands and they played through windmills and castles and over lakes in the sun. Once Grant left his putter at the hole they had just finished playing. Crystal went to get it for him and came up behind him and said, “Here, catch,” real quick, and tossed it, and it clattered down to the green artificial grass while her father, all shaken and gray with surprise, cringed and mumbled something nobody could understand. Several people were staring at them. Crystal went and picked up the club and put it back nice into his hand.

  “Of course I will keep the children, Karen,” Gregory says coldly.

  “The children? My children? No, Gregory, you wouldn’t.” Karen is sobbing again.

  “Oh, but I would!” says Gregory.

  “Now what are you crying about?” Neva asks, as soon as Lorene has got Denny quiet.

  “It’s just taking so long. I didn’t know you had to roll it up, too.” Crystal tries hard not to cry.

  “Well, sure I’ve got to roll it up if you want it to look like anything,” Neva says.

  Lorene comes over and gives Crystal a Kleenex. “Honey, don’t you want to look real cute for high school? School’s going to start in ten days.”

  “I don’t care,” Crystal wails. “I don’t care if I look cute or not, I don’t care, I don’t care!”

  Neva bites down on a bobby pin. None of her children would act like this. But then if it was her, she wouldn’t have stayed married to Grant Spangler long enough to have had any children in the first place.

  But Lorene is patient with Crystal, explaining, “It’ll be done pretty soon and you’ll like it, you’ll see, honey. Oh, honey,” she says, hugging Crystal, “you’re just going to be so pretty!”

  HIGH SCHOOL is like a movie that Crystal has almost seen, starring herself and Tim Considine and Annette Funicello and a lot of other ex-Mouseketeers. It’s like American Bandstand, which Crystal and Agnes watch most days after school. But it’s not exactly like these things either, and it confuses Crystal to be in this movie.

  Fall comes and drifts into October, frosty cold and dark in the early mornings so that there’s something secretive and exhilarating about getting up and dressing, getting books together, and eating while the windows outside are still black. Crystal leaves her house every day in this excited, trembling state. She feels like she used to feel when she was swinging very hard on the big swings at her old school, the moment when she was up in the air on a level with the bars before she bailed out.

  Agnes’s father takes them to school each day on his way to work. In the closeness of the car he smells strongly of Aqua Velva, so that Crystal has to open the window to keep from throwing up. Some mornings they have to pick up old Miss Marvell, who boards with Nancy’s grandmother, whenever she is substituting for somebody at school. Incredibly ancient, Miss Marvell has dyed her hair black and has bought herself a hairpiece to match. But this hairpiece is not as big as her bald spot, which causes Crystal and Agnes to roll over and over in the back seat every time they pick up Miss Marvell, shaking with awful, silent giggles at the way it looks from the back, the pale-blue rift of skin.

  Agnes’s father drops them off at the old Black Rock High School where he went to school himself. The school has not changed much since then. It is large, two-storied, rectangular, with a lot of windows with small rectangular panes of glass in them. Some of the panes have been broken out and have not been replaced. Behind the school building itself is a collection of prefabricated shacks built to catch the overflow of students. No grass grows in the schoolyard. It is red dirt and has been that way for years, hard as rock in dry weather, clammy, red, sucking mud whenever it rains, the kind of mud that makes excellent mudballs. Part of the schoolyard in front is paved in concrete, a sort of terrace, lined by the wooden fence with the green paint peeling off of it. It separates the concrete from the red dirt yard and runs along the sidewalk in front of the school. Boys sit on this fence or lean against it, watching the girls go by. In the mornings they are always there when Crystal and Agnes get out of the car. Three scraggly maple trees have been planted in the schoolyard by the Junior Women’s club as a part of their town’s beautification project. A flagpole is planted in a concrete block. Each week a different home room must put up the flag. Across a big gravel parking lot at the side is the elementary school where Crystal and Agnes went last year, a different world. Where they had their eighth-grade graduation wearing white dresses and wrist corsages and picked “Climb Every Mountain” as their class song. But they never go back there now.

  Now they rush into their home rooms, terrified of being tardy. They are never tardy. In home room Crystal checks her things carefully to be sure they’re all there: the three-ring notebook with the colored dividers, one for each subject she’s taking, English, alg. 1, French, social studies, biology. Crystal also takes chorus and phys ed on alternate days. If she makes cheerleader, she’ll have to drop chorus. Her home-room teacher is Miss Dale, who teaches home ec in her little kitchen in the basement of the school between the cafeteria and the locker rooms. Miss Dale makes all her own clothes. Her home room is a boring, efficient procedure, something to be gotton through every morning. Miss Dale calls roll and then somebody, usually Jubal Thacker, gives a prayer, and announcements take up most of the rest of the time. When the P.A. box crackles ominously, they can tell that the principal, Mr. Viers, is listening in. Agnes is not in Crystal’s home room. Pearl Deskins, who has been kept back two grades, is. Pearl wears a little round pearl collar on her sweaters, and straight, tight skirts; she’s becoming quite friendly to Crystal. They whisper in home room. Crystal’s home room also has rough boys in it who drop their pencils so they can look up the girls’ skirts; Pearl Deskins warns Crystal of this. It has a couple of junior varsity football players, and it has a lot of kids from up in the hollers who are poorly dressed and more nervous than Crystal. She is always nice to them. Once Crystal found one of the girls, Suellen Clevinger, eating her lunch in the girls’ bathroom because she was ashamed of what she had brought, cornbread and milk in a pint jar.

  Classes go by fast.
Crystal’s French teacher is Miss Martin, who wears very short skirts and sits up on top of her desk. While they are working, Miss Martin moves around the room and puts her hand on the back of the boys’ necks. The football coach, Mr. Swiggert, is Crystal’s biology teacher. He’s a nice man, but he doesn’t know any biology. He assigns a section each day and gives a test on it the next day from his teacher’s book. In class he tells jokes. One day when they are studying the circulation of the blood and poor Bobby Lukes is reading aloud, stumbling over all the words, Crystal has to get up and leave the class because she feels like she’s going to scream; she can’t stand to think about the circulation of the blood. She can’t stand to look at the little blue veins in her wrist. Crystal also has trouble with algebra. She doesn’t understand the signs. Her teacher, Mrs. Marshall, gives her extra work whenever she misses the problems in class. But she doesn’t understand the extra work either, so Agnes does it for her.

  Crystal likes English class, though, where her teacher is Mrs. Muncy, a blue-haired stocky woman who won’t put up with any foolishness. If you have Mrs. Muncy, you learn the parts of speech. You also have to read one outside reading book every six weeks from a list Mrs. Muncy made up. Everyone else hates Mrs. Muncy and thinks this is unreasonable, but Crystal likes her. She loves to go to the board and diagram compound-complex sentences.

  At the end of each class, the bell rings and they have three minutes to get to the next one. Crystal is always late. Sometimes it’s because she can’t work the combination on her locker. Most times, it’s because some boy is carrying her books for her. Often, too, she starts to drift when she walks down the tiled, crowded halls and sees all those faces coming up at her, so many faces, all different. You can pick out the kids from the hollers easily: they look different, somehow, from the town kids. A few are paler, or wall-eyed or crook-necked, but most seem bigger and healthier-looking. However they look, they look different. Crystal smiles and smiles at everybody; she really wants to be popular. At the end of the day, her mouth hurts from smiling so much.