Black Mountain Breakdown

by Lee Smith

  Crystal looks down at her feet in the red patent shoes. “He plays the guitar,” she says. “He wrote a song about me last week, now he won’t even take me home.”

  Agnes has nothing to say to that, it’s so dumb. Mack Stiltner is terrible and everybody knows it. She can’t see why Crystal goes out with him in the first place. Not with all the nice boys she has her pick of. You wouldn’t catch Agnes dead with somebody like that! Agnes thinks Crystal should have stuck to Roger Lee all along. But the boys that Crystal really likes are always weird, and look how mean she was to Roger Lee. Agnes never would have done Roger Lee that way and neither would anybody else that had a grain of common sense, but Crystal has got a weird streak in her someplace, too. Maybe she got it from her father. Agnes knows it’s wrong to think bad of the dead, but she can’t help it and she doesn’t really care: how she used to hate all those dumb, dumb poems.

  “Well, come on,” Agnes says. Then they have to make three trips back and forth to the car, loading all that Samsonite luggage, and Agnes has to carry most of it because Crystal has her roses and her trophy and her makeup case and her tiara to take care of, too. Finally they get it all in, and by the time Agnes drives back through town, carefully at the posted speed limit of twenty-five m.p.h., there’s no traffic at all and even the sidewalks are empty. On the way home, Agnes looks over at Crystal every now and then, but Crystal sits wrapped on the seat in that purple shawl her aunt made her, facing away, and her hoop sticks up over the dashboard.

  “Don’t you tell Mama I didn’t go to that party,” Crystal says when they pull into Agnes’s drive. Then she gets out of the car and runs across the side yard as fast as she can go, leaving all that luggage in the car, and Agnes watches her go until the white of her dress is gone.

  “Thank you,” Crystal calls back.

  Thank you, my foot! Agnes thinks, but she knows when to keep her mouth shut, and she never tells Lorene a thing.

  “SUMMER’S ON THE way,” Lorene announces one night, looking up from her ironing board and out the open kitchen window, and Crystal looks up from a book and says, “Well, what time do you expect him?” Then she could bite her tongue off—it’s not her mother’s fault that Mack is gone.

  Lorene blinks and wipes her face. She can’t decide if Crystal is being smart-alecky or just trying to make a joke. Crystal has been so moody lately, ever since she got to be Miss Black Rock High. Maybe it’s gone to her head.

  “Ha ha,” Lorene decides to say, but by then Crystal has gone back to her book and so Lorene’s little effort goes noplace. Lorene concentrates on her ironing, doing up Crystal’s new pink formal for the Miss Buchanan County beauty pageant. This one has spaghetti straps and a big ruffle around the bottom; they bought it at King’s in Bristol. Lorene applies spray starch to the ruffle and it comes out perfect, and Lorene wishes that Crystal herself was this easy to straighten out. Lorene suspects that Crystal’s mood has got something to do with Mack Stiltner leaving town, but of course she doesn’t mention this idea to Crystal, and Crystal never says a word about Mack. So nobody mentions him, but he’s gone, as definitely as if he never was here at all, as if he has disappeared into outer space instead of going to Nashville, which he really did.

  Somebody knocks on the door, three short taps.

  “Come on in!” Lorene hollers, expecting it to be Susie with that new little baby girl for her to watch awhile—a glutton for punishment, that’s what Neva calls Susie, who still won’t get her tubes tied but has these headaches in the afternoons—but instead it’s Jubal Thacker, child of God.

  “Hello there, Mrs. Spangler, Crystal,” Jubal says formally. He looks funny standing by the door in his tennis shoes and his dirty white socks, his cut-off jeans, his old familiar angular face and crazy tousled hair, now overlaid, all of him, with a glistening spirituality as noticeable as spray paint.

  Crystal looks up at Jubal and blinks. Something clicks inside her, something shifts and settles. She hasn’t looked at Jubal for about two years, she realizes. Here he has been two houses away and in her home room and she hasn’t even seen him for years! And he looks so different now. Crystal squints at him. “Well, hello, Jubal,” she says. “I haven’t seen you in a long time.”

  “I guess I’ve been busy,” Jubal says, looking down modestly, because he knows they know he’s preaching now.

  Crystal keeps staring at him, old skinny freckled-faced Jubal Thacker, and Lorene unplugs her iron and sits down and fans her face. Crystal wonders if Jubal ever hears voices, if Jubal has seen God’s face.

  “I wanted to congratulate you on winning the beauty contest,” Jubal says formally, still standing right by the door. “She sure did look pretty, Mrs. Spangler,” he says to Lorene.

  “Why, thank you,” Lorene says, and Crystal says nothing.

  Silence hangs in the kitchen until Jubal clears his throat finally and says it’s such a pretty night he just thought he’d go up to the Esso station to get a Coke and he just wondered if Crystal and Agnes wanted to come along.

  Crystal gets up like a girl in a trance and follows him out the door before Lorene can say a word, and Lorene watches them go across the side yard to the McClanahans’ house, still fanning herself, worried about something even though she couldn’t say what exactly, that look on Crystal’s face. Lorene is a good Methodist. She doesn’t hold with all that Pentecostal carrying on, snakes, God knows what all they do. She sure hopes Crystal isn’t going to take it into her head to date Jubal Thacker. Lorene realizes she would hate that worse than Crystal dating Mack Stiltner. It sounds crazy, but it’s true. Anyway Jubal Thacker has probably never had a date in his life. Lorene has never heard of him having one. Maybe he’s just lonely tonight. Lorene is lonely herself: Sykes off in Vietnam, Jules on a trip to Greece with his friend Carter E. Black (“Greece!” Neva had snorted when she heard it. “I don’t see how he’s got time to go to Greece when he hasn’t even got time to come home!”). Lorene shakes her head. At least she still has Crystal.

  There’s another knock on the door and it’s not Susie this time either. It’s Odell, asking if her upstairs toilet is still working good; he fixed it for her last week.

  “It’s fine, Odell,” Lorene says. “I sure do appreciate you fixing it,” and then, surprising herself, she says, “I was just fixing to have a cup of coffee. Why don’t you come on in?”

  Odell shifts from foot to foot outside her back door. “Well,” he says finally, “I guess I wouldn’t mind,” and he comes in and sits down in the rocker gingerly, as if the whole bulk of him might break it down.

  “It’s real nice in here,” he says after a while. Odell turns his hat around and around in his hands. He’s used to doing for other people, not having them do for him.

  Lorene fixes the coffee, still surprised at herself. When she looks over at Odell, he seems to fill her whole conversation area. She gets the coffee and sits down across from him, offers him Carnation and sugar, but he says he takes it black.

  “Well, Lorene,” Odell says, leaning back so the chair creaks and looking at her, “I been meaning to talk some business with you anyway.”

  “Is that a fact?” Lorene says easily, but her whole face sharpens up. Odell is nobody’s fool.

  “It’s about all that land up at Dry Fork,” Odell goes on, his words coming out slow since he’s not used to sitting in kitchens and talking to blondheaded women, especially not his half brother’s wife. “You know I’ve got some of it, you’ve got Grant’s part of it now, Nora and Grace and Devere has got some of it, and all together it adds up to where you would be surprised at how much it is.”

  “Well?” Lorene snaps. She can’t stand anybody beating around the bush.

  “Well, I’ve been having people ask me about it lately, just inquiring, you might say. Talking about leasing it, or some of it.”

  “Lord, I thought that was all over with,” Lorene says.

  “Maybe it is and maybe it’s not.” Odell finishes up his coffee. “There’s some now saying th
at the price of coal is going up again, you can’t tell how high. They say it’s because of the energy crunch and the A-rabs. I don’t know about that. But what I want to tell you, Lorene, is this—if anybody comes around asking you about that land, hold off. Act like you don’t know nothing about it. And I’d appreciate it if you’d let me know, if you wouldn’t mind. If things go like I hear they’re going to, if we can hold on to that and keep it all together, we might stand to get something out of it after all.”

  “Is that a fact?” Lorene is all excited; she always did like business.

  “Well, I appreciate the coffee,” Odell says, standing, and Lorene stands up, too. Odell grins at her, his gold tooth flashing once. Flustered, Lorene opens the door and Odell leaves. She hears his truck start up. My, my. Lorene leans her face against the doorframe. Her heart is just beating away. What if she was to make a fortune, after all these years? It’s never too late, as they say. Lorene goes back over and sits down, flipping the TV on automatically. She has always thought of Odell, if she thought of him at all, as some kind of a big trained bear, Grant’s pet. Now she leans forward and examines the rocker cushions carefully, but she can’t find a speck of dirt, not one. Odell wouldn’t be a bad looking man, either, if he knew how to dress. Lorene is lost in thought when Susie arrives; she doesn’t even know what’s on TV. Menopause, she tells Susie. Lorene says she can feel it coming on. She’s having a hot flash, she says. Susie says she wishes she’d get the menopause herself. That ought to fix Edwin’s little red wagon good, she says.

  Crystal and Jubal and Agnes sit out on Agnes’s porch next door, watching the cars go by. Crystal remembers sitting out here last summer and all the summers before that, and the trumpet vine smells so sweet she thinks she’s going to die. The trumpet vine makes her think about Mack, about sitting out here with him in the dark. Crystal can’t see Jubal very well right now, but he intrigues her. There’s something brand new about him, that shiny cast overlaid on him like he’s been dipped in gold. They talk a little bit about school, about Chester Lester, now out on parole.

  “I tell you, I just cross the street if I see him coming,” Agnes says. “It’d be all right by me if they kept him in there for the rest of his life.”

  “Me, too,” Crystal says, although she doesn’t really mean it. Chester Lester excites her, knowing how bad he is, his flat white monkey face.

  “I mean it, they ought to lock him back up,” Agnes goes on. “You all know how bad he is! You remember when he tied Crystal up and put those frogs all over her? Why, she was tied up for an hour.” And I untied her, Agnes thinks. Lord knows if I hadn’t come along!

  Crystal shivers and says nothing. Jubal is silent, too, and they hear some hollering out in the night by the Esso station, then quiet, the swishing sounds of the passing cars. Crystal wonders where Mack is and what he’s doing right now. It almost makes her cry to think what good care he took of his guitar.

  “Well, what do you think about it?” Agnes presses Jubal in her strident voice. “Why do you reckon they let him out so soon?”

  Jubal waits a minute. Then rather self-consciously he clears his throat. He says, “Chester Lester has got a soul, the way I see it, the same as you and me.”

  “Soul, my foot!” Agnes snaps. “He hasn’t any more got a soul than this table here.” Agnes kicks the table.

  “Everybody got a soul, Agnes,” Jubal says softly. “And anybody that’s got a soul, they can be saved, they can be changed. I’ve seen it. I know. It’s not ever too late for salvation.”

  “Hah!” Agnes snorts, but the hair along Crystal’s arms rises at the sound of Jubal’s voice. It’s something about the way he says things, so gently and so soft, not at all loud or too much in earnest like her uncle Garnett. Crystal feels funny in the pit of her stomach, and the trumpet vine smells sweet.

  “That brings me to what I wanted to tell you girls about,” Jubal continues easily, still soft, a disembodied voice coming out of the dark. “We’re having a revival next week. I just wanted to tell you all about it, and tell you you’re welcome to come. It’s going to be outside on the football field, nondenominational. Everybody is welcome to come.”

  “I don’t believe I’ll be able to make it,” Agnes says. “I’ve been saved ever since I was ten years old, thank you just the same.”

  “Well, think about it,” Jubal says. “We’ve got Fred Lee Sampson, evangelist, he’s coming here all the way from Arkansas, and the Singing Triplets are coming, too.”

  “The what?” asks Crystal.

  “The Singing Triplets,” Jubal says. “They’re real good. They’ve made two records already.” Crystal has a wild urge to laugh out loud, but she doesn’t.

  “Now, listen, Jubal,” Agnes says. “I’m real glad you’re going to be a preacher and all. I think it’s real nice. But I’ve got my own church to go to, and Crystal does, too, and it looks to me like we ought to just stick to our own.” Having delivered this opinion loudly, Agnes begins to rock with a vengeance, so that the creak each time she goes forward is the only sound for a while on the porch.

  “Crystal?” Jubal says.

  “What time does it start?” Crystal asks.

  CRYSTAL DRIVES TO the opening meeting alone, not mentioning to her mother beforehand where she is going. Lorene is at her Garden Club meeting anyway. Crystal drives slowly through town, stopping for the single traffic light, remembering all the rules from the driving booklet. It’s only the third or fourth time she’s driven alone, but Lorene has said she can take the car whenever she wants. Will Lorene be mad? Maybe, when she finds out where Crystal is going. But she did say that, after all. The light turns green, and Crystal steps on the gas. Everybody says that her grand-father Iradell’s wreck was what made them get a traffic light in the first place. Crystal doesn’t know if that’s true or not. She parks in the lot by the football field, puts the keys into her pocketbook, takes her wallet out, and examines the new driver’s license behind its clear plastic cover. “Wt 118, eyes B1.” The picture doesn’t look a thing like her. You could never tell she was Miss Black Rock High from that. The picture doesn’t even look like anybody she’s ever seen before. Crystal leans back on the white Naugahyde seat of Lorene’s Buick and lets the picture and the billfold slide back into her purse. A car pulls into the parking lot beside her and she breathes some dust, sneezes. She feels funny at the edges of her stomach. She’s got no business being here. She can guess exactly what Lorene will say when she finds out about it. She can imagine how her daddy would have laughed. “I put Jesus in the same category as penicillin,” Grant told her once with that old slow curling grin, “and there’s some that’s allergic to both.” Crystal takes the car keys back out and looks at them. She could always turn around and go home. Except she has the feeling in her stomach, and she has promised Jubal. She feels the way she’s felt before sometimes, like something is going to happen, like she doesn’t know exactly what she’s going to do but she’s pretty sure it will be something. After she does it, she’ll know what it is. Crystal gets out of the car.

  The enormous tent is set up smack in the middle of the football field, looking peculiar, like a huge, aberrant growth. This is where the football games are, and where she becomes a cheerleader every fall. She used to play hopscotch out here at recess in elementary school. Dust swirls around the edges of the tent, and its flaps flap in the hot, dry breeze. People park in the lot and hurry in, stream in, more people than Crystal could have ever imagined. Stepping over a tangle of electrical wiring, she ducks in, too, joins a whole group of people moving up a narrow dusty aisle and finally finds a folding chair. She looks around. This tent is so big it’s like a world in here. There are three main poles and lots of smaller poles holding it up. Away up there where the poles hit the canvas top, Crystal can see little circles of light-blue sky. Cone-shaped speakers are attached to the poles. Wires run everywhere. The tent will hold about five hundred people and it’s almost full now, but people keep coming in. Here and there Crystal see
s people she knows, mostly country people; only a few of Lorene’s friends are here. In the front center of the tent is a stage. The stage holds a portable organ, a bass fiddle, a set of sequined drums. It holds a pulpit exactly like the one her uncle Garnett preaches from at the Methodist Church, solid oak. In the very center of the stage is a giant plyboard cross, painted gold. It’s at least twenty-five feet high. Somebody has drilled holes all over it, and a colored light bulb has been placed in each hole. These lights are not shining now.

  Night is falling fast outside. A redheaded woman starts playing the organ on stage. She plays beautifully, long rippling runs on a jazzed-up version of “Nearer My God to Thee,” and the whole big crowd goes quiet. Crystal looks to her right and her left: a high-school couple on one side holding hands, having a date for the revival; a big, straggle-haired woman on the other side, holding a tiny little sleeping baby in a dirty pink knitted cap. Crystal cranes forward with the rest of them as people come out on the stage and occupy the chairs that have already been placed there, as the lights in the tent go dim and spotlights are trained on the stage.

  Melville Reed, the preacher of the Holy Pentecostal Church of God, Jubal’s church, comes forward first. He is a slight balding man with bulging eyes and a goiter, but he speaks straight and forcefully into the microphone and his voice echoes through the whole tent.

  “Praise the Lord!” he shouts, and Crystal jumps. “When I look out there tonight, and I see every seat filled in this great tent, a great cry rises up inside me. Praise the Lord!” he shouts again, and several people in the folding chairs shout, too. “When we were planning this revival, we were figuring the size of the tent, and some of us was holding out for a big tent and some of us was holding out for a little one. And when we called up Brother Fred Lee Sampson on the telephone and asked him what we ought to do about it, he said, ‘Rent me the biggest tent you can find, and trust in the Lord to fill it up!’ and He has done it, brothers and sisters, He has filled it up!” A lot of people shout, “Amen!” and “Yes!” at this. Crystal begins to feel uncomfortable. But she knows she can’t leave now.