Black Mountain Breakdown (12 page)

But Crystal pushes her mother away. She turns on her a face that isn’t like any face Crystal has ever worn, twisted and ugly and hateful, her eyes several shades darker and full of fire. Why are they taking her daddy? Where in the world is he going—Grant, who hasn’t left this house for years, off into the winter day with somebody he doesn’t even know? No one, no one may touch her. Because they may take him like that or think they take him, but in fact her daddy is all around her still, his presence filling the air. “Don’t touch me,” she spits at Lorene. “Get away from me. Get out of here. Don’t you
think
about touching me!” she says.

“See if Dr. Lewis is still down there,” Neva tells somebody,
and they go to get him, but Crystal snarls at him, too, like some kind of an animal. After she gets a shot she goes back to sleep, and this time she sleeps for a long, long time.

That night while the others go down to the funeral home, she stays turning in sleep in her bed, and Grace stays with her, and Roger Lee Combs comes and stays downstairs. They don’t want him to see Crystal right now, and he doesn’t really want to, either. He would just as soon wait until she’s got it all out of her system. But he has volunteered to stay downstairs while Lorene has to be at the funeral home. His mother and daddy will go by there, he knows, like everybody else in town. His mother was dressing to go when he left. Roger Lee himself is wearing a plaid sports jacket over his shirt; he thought he should. Roger Lee watches
Gunsmoke
. When that’s over, he gets up and fixes himself a plate of food. Lorene said to. The whole kitchen is running over with things to eat that people have brought. The refrigerator is crammed full, and foil-covered dishes line the counters everywhere. Roger Lee takes some fried chicken, corn pudding, rolls, slaw, two kinds of Jell-O salad, a piece of German chocolate cake and some buttermilk pie.

While Roger is eating, more people come in: Mrs. Ratchett with her famous corn lightbread, Miss Ida Rankin with a pot of green beans. “These come right out of my garden,” she declares, winking at Roger Lee. She is an old, old woman from way up on Dry Fork, a little bit touched in the head. “Put them up myself. He used to like them,” she adds, nodding wisely. “He used to eat them over at my house of a Sunday.” Wrapping her old coat around her, Ida Rankin
moves back out into the February cold. It has started to drizzle. Roger Lee shivers in his sports jacket as he closes the door behind her, wondering who she meant. Crystal’s father? Crazy to bring beans to a dead man. Roger Lee eats everything on his plate and goes back to watch TV. He’s still surprised that Crystal’s father died. Roger Lee has seen Grant so seldom that he never really gave him credit for existing at all, and this dying seems out of place.

Roger Lee is not surprised that Crystal is taking on so. His mother has always said that Crystal is “too emotional,” but Roger Lee doesn’t think so. He thinks everything about Crystal is perfect. Sykes calls up long distance just then, collect to say that he’s driving home and will get there about midnight, to tell Lorene not to wait up. Sykes’s voice is a lot more serious than anything Roger Lee can imagine coming from Sykes. Perhaps it’s a bad connection. Roger Lee goes back to watching TV and every now and then he hears Crystal’s aunt Grace say something upstairs, but he can’t hear the words and doesn’t want to. Her aunt Grace gives Roger the creeps.

Down at the funeral home, Lorene is holding up pretty well, holding up being naturally what she is best at. She stands by the door dressed in a navy-blue suit and kisses everybody and shakes their hands as they come into the room where Grant lies. Beside her is her brother Garnett, baldheaded and massively holy, speaking straight into everyone’s heart. Garnett is a toucher—he holds on to hands a long time when he shakes them, he kisses women and children, he puts his arm around shoulders and squeezes. Garnett likes to touch people. He’s always conscious of himself
as a living witness of God in the world. Susie and Edwin, all dressed up, are shaking hands, too. Nora sits in a big green leather armchair, and people go over there to speak to her. Odell is an embarrassment to everyone: he sits slumped in a straight-backed chair at the head of the coffin, looking madder than hell. He never went home to clean up, and he won’t say a word to anybody. Neva and her husband, Charlie, and her children are there; Edwin and Susie’s oldest kids are there; some old Spanglers everybody has almost forgotten about have come, including Blind Bob from up on Dicey, with his boneheaded handmade cane. When a lot of Peacocks come in the door, Nora won’t speak to any of them.

“Don’t he look peaceful?” people whisper over Grant.

“Looks like he just fell asleep.”

Neva, who put a little bit of foundation makeup on Grant, is satisfied. Lord knows he doesn’t look
good
, but he looks better than he did before she got there this afternoon. Bill Hart does a good job, but he hasn’t got any eye for the fine points.

They have dressed Grant up in an old blue suit they found in the closet upstairs, with a white shirt and a solid blue tie. With him lying there, it’s impossible to tell that they’ve got the clothes bunched up underneath him, the pants all folded over since he had gotten so thin. He’s visible only from the waist up.

“He just looks so natural,” somebody says.

But he doesn’t, Lorene thinks once, overhearing. He looks better than he has looked for years: eyes closed, face smooth with the foundation makeup, mouth closed, big
features still hawklike but rested, out of torment. Candles bum on each side of him in long wrought-iron holders. The lights in the room are dim, with flowers everywhere. “Sixty-three arrangements,” Neva whispered to her earlier, but now they’ve lost count. And the people keep coming and coming. Everybody from up on Dry Fork, everybody from the First Methodist Church where Garnett preaches and which Lorene attends, innumerable Sykeses and everybody who knows them, men from different places along Grant’s boyhood and his past.

THE CROWDED CHURCH
is overheated for the funeral, which is mercifully short. As Neva said to Charlie earlier, there isn’t much you could read out of the Bible that would apply to Grant Spangler. Garnett keeps the question of Grant’s soul out of it altogether, sticking to Ecclesiastes and Psalms, and Miss Belle Varney outdoes herself on the organ selections. Agnes and Roger Lee sit on either side of Crystal, who looks at everything very carefully and steadily and doesn’t cry and doesn’t say a word.

Crystal feels as empty as light, somewhere outside herself, seeing herself walk up the aisle, then sit, then walk back out at the end. The coffin is closed at the funeral and she has never seen her father’s body since Bill Hart and Neva fixed him up, but she hasn’t mentioned it to anyone, and nobody has mentioned it to her.

Sykes holds Lorene’s elbow carefully, guiding her out. To everyone’s surprise, he has been a big help ever since he got here. As the family leaves the church, everybody says how
sweet it is, and sad, Roger Lee and Crystal sitting together like that, and
look at Sykes!
and they all stare at Jules, who won’t look back at any of them, and at the weird friend he has brought home.

Jules’s friend is a man of about his own age, with a beard and a neat three-piece suit. He looks sissy, like Jules. The friend’s name is Carter E. Black. Jules and Carter E. Black are very solicitous of each other and stick pretty much to themselves. Before the funeral, Lorene asked Jules—since he
is
a professor of English, after all—to write up his father’s obituary for the
Black Rock Mountaineer
, but Jules refused.

Odell didn’t go to the funeral, but he’s waiting when the cars pull up at the graveyard on Dry Fork, sitting bent in the wind in a folding chair. Bill Hart has put a little canvas canopy over the grave, and two rows of folding chairs for the family. It has stopped raining today, but it’s bitter, biting cold, with a piercing wind.

Jules, whose field is the nineteenth century, thinks suddenly of how the Brontës kept catching cold at each other’s funeral and dying. But there is no way he can share his amusement with Carter right now. All Jules can do is silently turn up his coat collar and silently take his seat in the second row of folding chairs, after he has helped to carry the coffin. Pallbearer. Pall, the philosopher’s cloak. Hardly. Worn by Christians instead of the Roman toga. All palls. And is this all? Jules thinks furiously. Is this all there is to know, birth and breeding, the conqueror worm? Perhaps it is, but Jules will never know these things, not firsthand. He must make analogies, must draw them out from books. Jules momentarily envies Lorene her easiness, her openness,
the way she holds on to Sykes now when she needs someone to hold on to, the way she holds on to his uncle Garnett. Jules can’t reach out and hold on to anybody; and if his mother reached out for him, he knows he would stiffen and move away. Jules glares at the cool slick coffin itself and behind it some flowers and the other graves and the fence and the hill. Suddenly Lorene disgusts him with her red-nailed grasping hands—he sees them on Garnett’s sleeve in front of him, her brassy blond curly hair.
They have really fucked me up.
Jules smiles and almost laughs out loud, for this is the final irony even in his world where irony is everything: to know that this is not true, either, finally, for he knows and has always known too much, has seen both sides of every coin. Jules sits perfectly still in the funeral-home chair, folds his leather-gloved hands in his lap. What had he hoped to learn here?

Garnett sprinkles three handfuls of dirt on the coffin, in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. They lower it, and everyone rises to leave. Only Grace is sobbing, ladylike but unrestrained. “Hush,” Nora tells her firmly, but Grace keeps it up. She can’t help but remember Grant as a child right here on this place, herself not much more than a child, either, Emma’s little sister all dressed up. It’s as much for Emma’s little sister as for Grant that she cries now; it’s as much for Mr. Hibbitts, poor thing, with the winter leaves wet on his grave. “You go on to the house now,” Nora tells her, and Grace goes; she knows she needs a cup of tea. Nora follows her, heavily up the hill, and Devere is fixing a lamp in the parlor as they come in. Devere looks up and smiles. It’s no loss for him; for him, Grant
Spangler died years ago when he left them and moved to town.

Back at the graveyard, everyone else is leaving. But it’s hard to get Crystal to go. She wants to sit right there in her chair. Roger Lee tries to pull her up, but she doesn’t come. She smiles up at him brightly—after all, they’re going steady—but she can’t understand what he wants her to do. His voice echoes at her like he’s talking way down in a well. Roger Lee looks around for help, but Lorene’s back is turned.

She’s saying goodbye now to Jules, who will leave right from here in his rented car and drive back to Ohio with Carter E. Black. Jules and Sykes shake hands and Lorene cries a little.
Men
, she thinks. They both are men, or nearly. Jules leaves and now everybody is leaving except Bill Hart and his men and Odell. Neva and Charlie are taking Lorene. The Reverend Garnett Sykes goes over to help Roger Lee with Crystal.

Crystal is listening to how the canvas tent flaps in the wind. It’s almost like a little song. It’s like the wings of birds. Her daddy has died and now she knows it. This is all she knows right now, and her mind runs around and around this knowledge—it’s like a big rock in a field and she is roaming the field, playing. Every now and then she touches the rock and then skitters away. People are trying to distract her, but she’s not going to let them. She’s
not
. Roger Lee is talking into her ear on one side and Agnes on the other. She’d like to pull all of Agnes’s red hair out by the roots; she’d like to scratch Roger’s face with her fingernails. But that would not be good, that wouldn’t be nice, Agnes is her
best friend and she’s going steady with Roger. They’re trying to help her, and Agnes made all that potato salad for Lorene: smile now at nice Agnes and Roger. Crystal smiles brilliantly up at Roger and Agnes.

“Mama,” Agnes calls, and Roger Lee says, “Reverend Sykes?”

They pull at her arms, but she won’t come, listening to the flap-flap-flap of the tent in the wind, the murmur of voices around her. The ground is too cold today for her daddy; but
the highwayman came riding, riding, riding, the highwayman came riding up to the old inn door
. They pull her up from the chair and she screams out. There’s no ground at all, nothing but empty space beneath her feet.

Garnett Sykes shoos Roger and Agnes off like chickens. He puts his arm around Crystal and presses her to him.

“Come on, now, Crystal,” he says. “The Lord in His infinite wisdom takes care of us all.” Garnett Sykes believes this absolutely. He smells like Old Spice. Because of his voice and his huge warmth and mainly because there’s nothing else left to do, Crystal believes him. Contours, outlines, objects return to the world. She puts her feet down on the wet freezing ground and walks on back to the car.

THE NEXT SUNDAY
, Crystal goes to church with Lorene. Lorene didn’t make her. Crystal got up and got dressed and suggested it herself. She goes the Sunday after that, too. There’s something about the program that she likes. It’s new and fresh every Sunday, smelling faintly of mimeograph fluid. A cross with lilies is mimeographed at the top. Crystal
likes the way things happen in order, the way the program says they will, from the prelude right down to the benediction.

She still has not accepted Jesus Christ as her personal Lord and Savior. She has not been born again. She sits quietly in church during Garnett’s long loud prayers and looks down at her hands. Garnett is famous for his frank, conversational prayers: talking man-to-man to God, he calls it. Crystal feels nothing at all during these prayers, except sometimes her mind wanders out the stained-glass windows and up into the mountains and she thinks of the Swift silver mine, or John Hardin, or any long story or song that she can. Grant’s absence is still there like the big rock and she’s still skirting it warily, getting used to it bit by bit.