Black Mountain Breakdown

PRAISE FOR
Black Mountain Breakdown

Berkley titles by Lee Smith

THE DEVIL’S DREAM
FAIR AND TENDER LADIES
ORAL HISTORY
BLACK MOUNTAIN BREAKDOWN

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 In the latter portion of the novel, I use some direct quotations from the unpublished memoirs of my ancestor Charlotte Field, born in 1842 on the Eastern Shore of Virginia.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.

I

II

III

N
OW 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.