Black Mountain Breakdown

by Lee Smith

  Fred Lee Sampson leaves then, going off to hold another revival in Durham, North Carolina, and Crystal is a part of the big crowd that gathers in the early morning one day to see him drive away forever in his camper. The camper has a picture of Jesus on the back of it. That’s the last thing Crystal sees as the camper leaves the school ground and goes down the road and turns left at the bend of Slate Creek.

  BUT ABOUT FOUR days later, Crystal suddenly decides that she doesn’t want to read the Bible with Jubal after all. It’s too hot—ninety-four degrees. So instead of going over to Jubal’s, she calls Agnes up and asks her if she wants to drive out to Pikeville, Kentucky, and go swimming. Agnes agrees. They invite Jubal to come along with them, but he’s busy, he says. Even over the telephone Crystal can tell he’s disappointed in her although he doesn’t say anything about it, just by the sound of his voice. In fact, he sounds pretty put out, which makes her feel awful. So Crystal looks out the car window and doesn’t say much on the way. Suddenly everything along this road looks new to her, fresh and green. The mountain woods on either side of them look almost violently green, in fact, and the sky is blue as a shout, and as exciting. She’s been inside, Crystal realizes, for days.

  Agnes drives them carefully over the mountains, and when they arrive the pool is already crowded. They pay at the gate, change, and spread their towels out on the cement. Crystal loves the way the hot cement burns right up through the towel into her body, the grainy scratchy way it feels when she shifts around on the towel. The air is full of pool smells: chlorine, suntan lotion, popcorn. The sun is blinding; she should have brought her sunglasses. She should have brought some cotton pads for her eyes, too. Crystal hasn’t been out in the sun for so long, she’s forgotten how to act. She jumps in and swims up and down, bumping into people everywhere and splashing, but Agnes can’t swim and so she stays in the shallow end. Agnes doesn’t want to get her hair wet, either. She has to go to a 4-H picnic that night.

  When they emerge from the water, they are surrounded almost immediately by a gang of rough Pikeville boys, pushing each other around at the perimeter of their towels and showing off for Crystal. Crystal wears a black two-piece bathing suit and lies on her stomach. Every now and then she looks up, pushes her hair back, and grins at the boys. It seems like it’s been a really long time since she’s seen any boys.

  After the boys finally go back into the water, Agnes sits up. She’s in a bad mood. Of course she’s glad that Crystal has been born again, but she doesn’t think much of the way in which Crystal went about it, and Crystal has been so busy with Jubal ever since that Agnes hasn’t seen her for days. And now all she wants to do is pay attention to these dumb boys.

  “I saw you flirting just then,” Agnes says.

  “Flirting with who?” Crystal’s voice is muffled by the towel. Oh, here we go again! she thinks. Agnes can be so hard to get along with sometimes.

  “That boy in the red bathing suit.”

  Crystal shifts position slightly and doesn’t reply.

  “Well, if you’re so religious I don’t see why you were flirting with that boy,” Agnes goes on.

  “The Lord wants us to love one another,” Crystal explains in her new sweet voice, the voice Agnes already hates. “I love you, for instance,” she adds.

  “Oh, for goodness’ sakes!” Agnes for once is at a loss for words. Also, strangely, she’s blushing.

  “Why don’t you just lie back down on your towel?” Crystal suggests equably. “You’re getting in my sun.” Most summers, she’s been real tan by now, she remembers. She stretches her legs out as far as they’ll go: they’re white. “You’re getting in my sun,” she says again.

  Agnes ignores this remark. “Another thing I don’t understand,” she goes on, determined to have it out, “is, if you’re so religious, how come you’re still going to be in that beauty contest? You have to wear a bathing suit in this one, don’t you?”

  “Yes,” Crystal says. “That’s why I wish you’d get out of my sun.”

  “Well?” Agnes pursues. She sees the boys pulling up at the far end of the pool and then looking this way; she knows they will soon be back.

  “Oh, come on, Agnes,” Crystal says. “Jubal thinks it’s fine and so does Mama and so does Uncle Garnett. And so do I,” she adds grimly, remembering how Mack had told her she couldn’t have it all. She’ll show him. She can’t think of any good reason not to be in that beauty contest, anyway. The body is a temple of holiness, Jubal said—or something like that. Besides, you have to do something, don’t you? You can’t just sit around for the rest of your life.

  “Well, what are you going to do for your talent?” Agnes asks. “Don’t you have to have a talent in this one, too?”

  Crystal rolls over on her back, shading her eyes with one hand. She’s been thinking about that. “I think what I’m going to do,” she says slowly, “is a dramatic reading from Ecclesiastes. You know that part about for everything there is a season?”

  Agnes’s mouth drops wide open, but Crystal has taken her hand down and she’s staring straight up at the cloudless sky and her eyes are that same color blue. Then soon the boys are back, splashing water on them, and then they have to leave before Agnes gets too much sunburn.

  CRYSTAL WINS THE Miss Buchanan County Contest on June 19, placing first in the talent and evening-dress competitions and second (she’s still a little thin since her salvation) in the bathing-suit division.

  On August 2, Crystal and Lorene and Neva make the long drive across the state to Richmond, where they will stay in the John Marshall Hotel for four days while Crystal competes in the Miss Virginia Contest. Crystal hates the trip: Lorene and Neva insist on driving with the air-conditioner on and the windows all rolled up so the wind won’t blow their hair, but they smoke so much that Crystal, in the back seat, feels slightly sick the whole way and spends most of her time lying down pretending to be asleep. Another advantage of riding this way is that Lorene and Neva will gossip without restraint when they think she’s sleeping, so Crystal hears it all. She learns that Mrs. Belle Drury had her tubes tied in the Richlands Hospital without telling her husband right after she recently had her third baby, a boy, and that this made Mrs. Drury’s husband, Roy Drury, so mad—because he is a Catholic from Ohio, Neva adds—that he took a sledgehammer to her brand-new Singer sewing machine and busted it all to pieces. Which upset Belle Drury so much that now she has moved back in with her parents, bringing both kids and the new baby, too. This story amazes Crystal, who knows Mrs. Belle Drury only from seeing her at the public library: a small, pale young woman with runny-nose children who hang on her skirts, checking out two Gothic novels a week at the desk. In her mind Crystal has a clear picture of the girls on the covers of these novels (in despair, wearing long pastel satin dresses, fleeing across some dark landscape from the gloomy castle in the background) but no clear image at all of Mrs. Belle Drury who is living through such a hard time. Neva goes on to say that Charlie, her own husband, has been suffering from a hiatal hernia lately and it has not improved his disposition one bit. “Charlie never was a figure of fun, anyway,” Neva says, and Lorene remarks that he has his good points all the same. Neva says she guesses so, and mentions that Grant did, too, she supposes, and Lorene agrees. “But I don’t see how you did it,” Neva says, and Lorene changes the subject to Louise Altemose whose thyroid gland turned out to be malignant when they took it out last week. Then they talk about floor coverings, Armstrong versus the cheaper Sears, and about whether Neva ought to put indoor-outdoor carpeting in the Clip-N-Curl or not. This conversation leads to the condition of Loretta Hurley, one of Neva’s girls, who is ruining all her chances of getting married by living with her mother and dating the same boy for five years when he is not, Neva swears, the marrying kind in the first place. He eats supper every single night with Loretta and her mother, apparently. And he never will pop the question, Neva says, if Loretta won’t stop giving him a free lunch all the way around, if Lorene knows what she means. Crys
tal knows what she means.

  The two women talk on about marriages and divorces, death and birth and illness: it’s soothing, and has nearly put Crystal to sleep when Lorene says, “Neva? Do you remember that party we had for Saint Patrick’s Day that time?” “What party?” Neva asks. “You and me. It was when I was fourteen and you were sixteen and we had it in the old Moose Lodge before it burned. Don’t you remember? We put green crepe paper all over the place.” “We sure did! We had those little sandwiches,” Neva says.

  This whole party is news to Crystal, who cannot imagine such a thing. Not green crepe paper, or Lorene at fourteen, or Neva ever young at all, for that matter. Lorene was probably a lot like Babe. Crystal wonders where she’ll be and what she’ll be doing when she’s Neva and Lorene’s age. They might even be dead then, for one thing, whether they had a party or not. Crystal shivers. She can’t imagine herself old. But she can see herself some years from now, and a whole series of tableaux goes through her mind. She’s a movie star, world famous, and at her side always is her short swarthy husband with the cigar in his mouth, who masterminds her career. Gossip columnists analyze this marriage all the time, but nobody can figure it out. They have a magnetic attraction for each other, that’s what, a psychic pull which extends beyond the grave. What grave? Lord. Crystal shivers. Or she is in Nashville with Mack who has become a legendary star himself, and they are both wearing cowboy suits emblazoned with red sequins, posing for photographers. Then Mack runs all the photographers out with a masterful sweep of his hand and locks the door. He pulls her toward him and rips off the top of her cowboy suit, scattering sequins all over the white shag carpet. They make love on the carpet, in the red sequins, and it is wonderful and Crystal is the envy of millions of his fans. Mack leaves his cowboy hat on while they make love. Or she is some kind of a church worker in a high mountainous visionary country like Tibet, where she sees herself pushing open a massive carved door and being immediately surrounded by thirty or forty sweet little starving children who have brought her hundreds of flowers. A man in this country loves her, a poet with burning eyes who sits cross-legged on a flowered rug and smokes opium in a pipe all day long, and although she responds to the spiritual passion of this doomed poet, she can never be his; she has dedicated herself to God, to these children in this remote and austere mission, even though she has contracted amoebic dysentery and TB. “I am here but to serve,” she tells the poet sorrowfully.

  “What, honey?” Lorene asks.

  “Nothing, Mama.” Crystal sits up. “Where are we, anyway?”

  “We’re right outside Lynchburg,” Lorene says. “I’ve got a pimiento cheese sandwich right here whenever you’re hungry.” Neva and Lorene pack everything when they travel; there’s no sense throwing money away. They have even brought a coffemaker to plug in, in their room at the John Marshall Hotel. They won’t stop, either, although Crystal would like to see Natural Bridge.

  “Tourist trap,” Neva snorts.

  And of course they are not tourists. They are here on serious business, which Lorene makes clear right away to the man at the desk when they check in that night at their hotel. He’s polite but not impressed: this whole hotel is full of contestants like Crystal, and all their mothers and sisters and aunts. Crystal sits in a chair in the lobby of the John Marshall Hotel, watching the people come and go, their luggage carried by grinning red-suited Negroes. Negroes fascinate her; there are no Negroes in Black Rock and there’s no reason for them to move there, either, Lorene has always said. Nothing to do except work in the mines, and there’s not enough of that to go around in the first place. Crystal watches one boy about her own age, carrying somebody’s bag. He wears earplugs, and wires run down inside his red suit to some invisible radio, tuned to jazz. He bops and shuffles, all caught up in the beat. Crystal would like to hear it, too. She would like to be him. Or she would like to be that frail elegant woman in the hot-pink linen suit, smoking cigarettes, looking distraught. Maybe her lover is late. Crystal would like to smoke cigarettes. She used to have a lover but he’s gone. And anyway that was a sin, she reminds herself, but she has never been able to really feel that connection between her life and her salvation—which after all applies to the afterlife primarily—so she abandons that idea as being beside the point. It is beside the point.

  After Lorene has signed them in, they go straight up to their room on the eighth floor, accompanied by a porter with their bags. Lorene tips him, then shuts the door. Lorene and Neva are worn out, they say. And Crystal needs her beauty sleep. The definition of beauty sleep, according to Lorene, is any sleep you get before one A.M. After that, according to her, doesn’t count. Neva locks both locks and pulls an armchair up against the door. “You can’t ever tell,” she says. Neva retires to the bathroom and comes back out in a billowing green lace negligee which makes her look enormous and weird, like an overgrown fairy from Shakespeare. Lorene sits down in front of the mirror to count her money and cream her face.

  Crystal sits by the window and begins to read her Bible dutifully, but she can’t keep her mind on the words. She stands up and raises the window to let the hot city air of Richmond come into the room, and she gulps it as if it could tell her something; it smells like gasoline, fried food, garbage, indefinable city things. Down below her on Broad Street, traffic is all snarled up, and in the night she hears sirens scream. Somewhere down there, people are stabbing each other, people are killing other people, robbing stores, fucking each other, people are yelling and screaming, houses are burning down to the ground. All of life is going on down there without her. Even Revelations is boring compared to Richmond. “Shut that window,” Lorene says.

  The next day they go shopping before the official round of activities starts with a Coke party in Capitol Park at two. Before they leave the room, Lorene puts her money into her bra so that it won’t be stolen by Negroes. Crystal looks up and down the streets of Richmond carefully. There’s so much going on here; it’s a new world, hot and busy and rushed. They go into Miller and Rhoads, where Crystal fingers dress after dress on the long racks. Salesgirls hover around her; Lorene has told them why she’s here. “That’s just your style!” they say when she tries a sleeveless blue-and-white stripe. “It was made for you!” they say when she tries on a flowery pink shift. But Crystal doesn’t believe them. She can’t decide. She is thoroughly bemused by herself in the three-way mirrors of Richmond. Finally Lorene steps in and picks a black cotton sundress with a square-cut neck and a geometric border around the bottom.

  Crystal wears it later to the Coke party, where all the girls pose on children’s play equipment while the children, dispossessed, fight in the sand or look on. “Isn’t this fun?” all the girls say brightly to one another, except for one tall girl from Manassas who whispers, “This is a lot of shit, isn’t it?” to Crystal, even while they both smile brilliantly and a photographer clicks away. Crystal stares at this girl and doesn’t answer. Is it a lot of shit?

  Several times during the next few days she manages to get away from Neva and Lorene, and go out alone. She walks for a block or so, shielding her purse. She passes a Greek restaurant, an Italian restaurant, a dancing school, a shop that sells handmade leather goods. There’s an antique shop with a grandfather clock in the window and a whole family of antique china dolls. Grace would love them. The faces of the people she meets are so various, their clothes so different, that Crystal is breathless by the time she arrives back at the John Marshall Hotel. Pigeons perch on the edge of its roof. Neva says they are nasty and carry diseases, but Crystal loves them. They are impudent city pigeons which add some sort of a finishing touch to the fluted roof. Well-dressed men sit in dark leather chairs in the lobby, reading newspapers. After the second day, the doorman nods to her. The man at the desk smiles. At the elevator, people kiss each other on the cheek in greeting. She can’t get enough of Richmond.

  Richmond is so wonderful, in fact, that the contest itself becomes secondary in her mind and is something of a letdown anyway.
Her dramatic recitation from Ecclesiastes is not a hit. She places fourth, though; the first three spots are won by older girls. Lorene is put out. The first runner-up is bowlegged, she declares. Actually she feels that Crystal would have won the whole thing if she had a better talent and if she hadn’t been a junior in high school. The first prize was a college scholarship; after all, as she points out later to Neva, they couldn’t very well give it to a junior; and Neva agrees. “We jumped the gun,” she says. Next year, Lorene thinks.

  Crystal doesn’t care. She’s famous. By the time they get back home (after stopping at Natural Bridge to please her, where a loud symphonic recording of “How Great Thou Art” comes from some mysterious wooden source while they view the bridge; where Lorene buys four placemats with a picture of the bridge on them and Neva buys a pink glass vase) her picture has been on the front page of the Black Rock Mountaineer, and Arvis Ember interviews her on his radio program. “It’s a memory I will always cherish,” she tells him, with that girl from Manassas in the back of her mind. “Everyone there was so sweet.”

  LORENE PUTS ALL of Crystal’s trophies and ribbons up on the mantel in the front room, and boys from the surrounding towns—Pikeville, Richlands, Haysi, Welch—begin to call her up. Crystal has a different date practically every night. She likes all these boys. They all have cars and they have change in their pockets. They adore her and Crystal likes them all, even the dumb ones, even the sarcastic ones, even the ones with deep, fake laughs. She likes their pressed pink shirts and their yellow shirts and their Madras pants. It’s a funny thing, but she doesn’t feel real when she’s by herself, or perhaps it’s only that she doesn’t feel again the way she felt with Mack or the way she felt the night when she was saved. Crystal continues to read her Bible and to discuss with Jubal the workings of the Lord, but the glory is fading fast. It’s only when she’s talking to Jubal or to her uncle Garnett and sees in their eyes herself—Crystal saved—that she is conscious of her salvation.