Foggy Mountain Breakdown and Other Stories (3 page)

Sam smiled. “Like M. L. and Lewis and Tom. The trick is not to come back. But everybody does sooner or later.”

“You thinking about coming back?”

“I don’t know, Fran. Why?”

“Because we’ve got to figure out what to do about Dad.”

She told him how, after fifty years of marriage, he couldn’t even fry an egg, and might be too old to learn. The question was: should they try to hire him a housekeeper, look into retirement communities, or arrange for him to come and live with one of them?

“Washington or Chicago,” said Sam. “That’s a pretty big change for a man his age.”

“Well, he might like it,” snapped Frances Lee. “Lord knows, anything would have to be an improvement after living with Mama all these years. He can finally start to enjoy himself.”

“Okay,” said Sam. “Go get him and we’ll talk about it.”

The straight-backed kitchen chair on the porch was always Wesley’s chair. He sat down in it now, feeling a little like a man asking for a bank loan, in front of these two stern-faced adults who were—and weren’t—his children. Frances Lee was doing most of the talking, but he couldn’t quite make out what they wanted. It was too soon after … the other … for him to think about anything else. It had to do with his future, though.

“Of course, we want you to do whatever will make you happy, Dad,” his daughter was saying. Her voice used to be like her mother’s, but she had a Yankee accent now, and the resemblance was gone.

“Happy …” he echoed, catching her phrase.

“We don’t want to force you into anything.” She smiled, patting his sleeve. “You had enough of being bossed around from Mama. So we want you to feel free as a bluejay. You can finally be happy and do as you please.”

Do as he pleased … Her voice faded in his mind and became Addie’s voice. They had been courting for a few weeks that fall—mostly just walking in the woods while he
called himself hunting. He had done most of the talking—about his knack for machinery, and his plans to make something of himself. She had walked along beside him in silence, sometimes nodding at what he said. She was small, with a broad bony face under a cloud of black hair, and though she never said anything about how she felt, her blue eyes shone when she looked at him. When they were alone. Never at any other time.

“I’ve got to get down outta these hills,” he told her that day. “Makin’ a livin’s easier in town. I can get a job with the railroad, workin’ in the machine shop. But I got to live in town to do it.”

“You do as you please,” said Addie McCrory.

“But …” He hesitated with the weight of the asking. “I want you to come with me.”

He didn’t say any more, and she didn’t either. No Solitary McCrory had ever been fool enough to leave the hills. They weren’t used to town ways, and they couldn’t change any more than a chicken hawk could. Kept to themselves and didn’t make friends. “Ain’t nothing we want bad enough to go to town for,” the McCrorys used to say. He had almost realized even back then what it would be like for her to be set down among people who never would understand. A house in town and all those strangers: it was like asking anybody else to live in a cage, but he had asked because he wanted her with him. He would have gone anyway, but he wanted her with him.

She looked at him for a long time before she finally said: “I’ll come.”

He reckoned she liked him then, but he hadn’t really understood until after she was his, and he learned that McCrory feelings were like a fire in a woodstove: the flames were hid behind iron walls, but inside they burned brighter and longer than any open fire. She had gone with him, and never once in all those years that followed had she mentioned it, or asked to go back. If she had, he would have gone with her.

“Dad?” said Frances Lee a little louder. “What would you like to do?”

“I don’t reckon it matters,” said Wesley.

T
HE ROAD WAS
even narrower than he remembered. It lurched and bucked through the granite spines of the Unaka Mountains, cutting through tilting pastures and scrub forest like the dusty tongue of a coon dog lapping the Nolichucky River a few miles farther on. They weren’t going that far, though. The trail to the old homeplace should lie past a few more bends in the road. There would be a mark on an outcrop of limestone, his cousin Whilden had told him, and a little turnoff where he could park the four-wheel drive. They would have to walk the rest of the way.

“Course you can’t drive up there,” Whilden had warned him. “It’s purt near straight up. We couldn’t hardly get a mule up there to clear timber.”

That was fine with Carl. He would welcome the isolation, but he’d had a hard time convincing Whilden of that. “A-lord, Carl-Stuart,” his cousin kept saying. “You don’t want to spend your honeymoon in that old place. Why, there ain’t no lights nor running water.” He had even offered the newly weds his own room, reckoning he could bunk on the sofa if they were so dead set on coming for their honeymoon. Carl smiled a little, remembering their phone conversation. Whilden didn’t come right out and say it, but it was plain enough that he thought
that if he were a big-time engineer in San Francisco, he’d find a better place to take his bride than Cabe’s Hollow, Tennessee. Carl wondered what Whilden would consider a suitable location for a honeymoon: Bermuda, Atlanta … or Myrtle Beach, South Carolina? Elissa had talked about going to Mexico, but he told her that he wanted her to see where he’d grown up. The folks were dead, of course—except for a passel of cousins—but the land had hardly changed at all. He smiled at a couple of white-faced calves poking their noses through a fence: except for a score of years, they might be Bushes and Curly, the pair he had lovingly raised as a 4-H project.

Why had he been so insistent on coming back here? He hadn’t been back to Tennessee in years. Perhaps it was some sort of familial instinct—this urge to bring his bride back to the family seat, as if the ghosts would look on her and approve. Anyway, he had wanted Elissa to see the hills. Maybe then she would understand why California’s mountains just weren’t the same. His homesickness for the mountains was unassuaged by jaunts to Lake Tahoe. The silver-capped Rockies stretching out like a Sierra Club calendar left him unmoved, while these stubby weathered hills, silver with winter birches, made his heart tighten. Damn near twenty years, and he still thought of it as home.

“So these are your precious Appalachians.” Elissa smiled, nodding at a not-too-distant skyline. “They don’t seem like mountains.”

“I know.” He had thought about that when he realized that the Rockies were different from his mountains. The Appalachians don’t stand back and pose for you, he finally decided. They come up close and hold you, so they don’t seem so big and imposing. Cabe’s Hollow must be about three thousand feet above sea level, but you didn’t feel it, because you were in the mountains. Among them.

“This is Cabe’s Mill Road,” he told her. He remembered the gristmill at the end of it, down by the river. It
was probably abandoned now. He’d heard that Old Man Cabe had died, and he didn’t suppose that Garrett would have stayed around to run it. Garrett always was a hell-raiser. Used to chase girls through the fields waving a black snake like a bullwhip. Maybe they’d go down and take a look at the mill sometime. Past a steep bend in the road, he saw the flash of an X mark in yellow rock. “Here’s the turnoff to the cabin.”

Elissa straightened up and looked out the window. “Good. I’m stiff from riding. First the airplane, and then all these archaic little roads. What cabin? I don’t see any cabin.”

Carl grinned. “Now, Mrs. Spurlock, you’re talking like a city girl.”

She made a face at him. “Give me time. I’ve only been married to a hillbilly for six hours. But where is the cabin? I don’t see it! Is it behind those trees?” She pulled out her compact and began arranging her hair and dabbing at her nose.

“You see that mountain there?” he said. “Well, the cabin is at the end of a little path that goes straight up it.”

Elissa lowered her compact slowly. “Is this the surprise you promised me, Carl?”

He flushed a little. “Elissa, I just had to get you to see it. This land has been in my family for a hundred and fifty years. My great-grandfather built this old cabin. It’s important to me. Please?”

She straightened her alpaca ski hat and smoothed her bangs. “You want me to walk all the way to the top of a mountain to look at a cabin?”

“No. That’s where we’re going to stay. Remember? I told you I’d called my cousin Whilden, who owns this land now, and he—”

She smiled carefully. “Is that what you meant by a cabin? It’s not a ski lodge or anything like that?”

“Just a cabin. Remember how you said you’d go camping with me sometime?”

“But, Carl, it’s December!” said Elissa, still smiling.

“There’s a fireplace.” He looked up at the mountain, darkening against a red sky. The trees were no longer distinct. “We’d better get started. The light’s going.”

He pulled down the back tailgate and hauled out his canvas valise, while Elissa stood at his elbow, making little clouds with her breath. “It’s getting late, so I’m only going to make one trip tonight. Which one of these do you need?” He pointed to the three pieces of matching pink luggage.

“All of them, I guess,” said Elissa in a puzzled voice. “I don’t remember what I packed where.”

Carl rubbed his chin and considered the problem as if he were at work, plotting out the weight distribution in a B-1B. Finally he said: “I’ll carry my bag and that big suitcase of yours. If you need anything else, you’ll have to carry it.”

He hoisted her suitcase out of the truck. After a moment’s hesitation, she picked up the makeup case and nodded for him to close the hatch.

“Don’t forget to lock it, Carl!”

He smiled. “This isn’t Aspen, Elissa. The only people on this road are the Pattons and the Shulls—and they wouldn’t take sugar packets from a diner, much less rob a truck!”

“Things might have changed in fifteen years, Carl!”

He looked around him. Things might have changed—but that hadn’t. Cabe’s Mountain stood just as bare and wild on this December evening as it had years ago when he’d hunted squirrel with Garrett up this very path. Only he had changed: the engineer with a Ph.D. from Stanford and an aerie of chrome and glass overlooking the Bay. He had come a long way from Cabe’s Hollow. “Come on, Elissa! We’re burning daylight!”

They were following an old logging trail which led to the foot of the mountain. She clumped along beside him in her slim leather boots, crackling leaves with every
step. Just as well they weren’t hunting squirrels; she was making enough noise to wake up the bears.

“Are we almost there, Carl?” panted Elissa, after a few moments’ silence.

Carl turned to look at her. He could still see the truck parked by the road. “We haven’t started yet.” He smiled reassuringly. Elissa was so beautiful in her embroidered white ski parka, her cheeks pink with cold. She looked expensive and—his mind fumbled for the word—classy. Like one of those evening gown models in the old Sears Wishbook. She did him proud.

He came to the edge of a branch of swift-running spring water. It was clear, about ankle-deep, and four feet across.

“Where’s the bridge?” asked Elissa at his elbow.

“See that cinder block in the middle? You step on to that and then over to the other side.”

“But the cinder block is under water, Carl!”

“About an inch.”

In the end he had to take the suitcase across, and then come back and carry her over the stream. She was afraid she would fall, and she kept saying that she couldn’t get her new boots wet. She held out one small foot, pointing to the shining leather boot with its dainty two-inch heel. Carl frowned. “I told you to wear walking shoes, Elissa. How are you going to climb in those things?”

Her face fell. “Don’t you like them? They cost a hundred and eighty-five dollars.”

He sighed. “Just watch where you’re walking. It’s rained here in the last day or two, and the ground is apt to be slippery.”

“I’ll be fine, darling. I jog, don’t I?”

The path up the mountain to the cabin was not so much a trail as an absence of underbrush in a wavy line weaving its way upward. Fallen trees obstructed the way, and outgrowths from nearby bramble bushes slowed them down. Carl went first, stopping to untangle Elissa
from the briars or to lift her over a tree trunk. She had not spoken since they began the climb; he could hear her breath coming in labored gasps. Every twenty feet or so they stopped to rest, until her breathing was normal again, before resuming their climb.

“Jogging on flat land is a lot different from mountain climbing,” he said gently. “You just tell me when you want to rest again.”

“No. No. I’m fine, but this boot heel is coming loose.” She took a deep breath. “You don’t think I’m going to let a man twelve years older than I am beat me up a mountain, do you?”

Carl smiled. “You’re doing fine.” He slowed his step a little and began to talk, to take her mind off the climbing. “You know, that branch back there put me in mind of my uncle Mose. He used to come here bee-tracking in the summertime. Of course, bees need water in the hot summer to make honey and to cool the hive, so they fly to the nearest stream to get it. Well, my old uncle Mose would locate a bee watering place, and he’d sit down nearby, and just watch those bees leave with a stomachful of water. He’d follow their flight with just his eyes for as far as he could see them. Past that sumac bush or that service tree. After a while he’d move to that tree and sit and watch several more bees go by, and note the next place he lost sight of them. After a couple of short hops like that, he’d finally get to the hollow tree they were headed for. He’d mark the tree so he could find it again, and go on home.”