Foggy Mountain Breakdown and Other Stories (4 page)

He glanced back at Elissa. She seemed to be concentrating on the path. Her face glowed from exertion, and she pushed at her wet bangs with the wrist of one glove. Impulsively, he took the makeup case from her and tucked it under his arm. She did not look up.

“Course now, the reason Uncle Mose would mark that tree would be so that he could find it again come fall,” Carl went on. “Long about late October, he’d come back
down the mountain with a zinc washtub, ax, rope, and a little box, and he’d set to work. He’d split that hollow tree open, catch the queen in a box, scoop all the honey out into the washtub, and carry it home. The bees would usually swarm on a branch, so he’d cut down the branch and take it home, where he’d built some hives in the back garden. Then he’d let the queen bee out of the box, and put the branch down beside the homemade hive, which had some of the honey put in it for the bees to winter on. The rest of the honey went into pint jars for the family. It took patience, but the results were worth it.” He turned to look at her.

Elissa regarded him steadily. “I loathe bees.”

They stood on the mountaintop, a narrow ridge of sturdy pines, and looked down at the little meadow cupped in a hollow below the summit. The land had been cleared and cultivated years before, and the little cabin, which sat in a puddle of sunlight at the edge of the garden furrows, seemed sturdy for its age. Brown winter grass stretched away to the forest which encircled it, and aluminum pie tins, strung from branches to keep the birds from the garden, twirled soundlessly in the wind. The stillness was so absolute that it might have been a sepia photograph from Carl’s family album, or a dream in which time elapses in slow motion. Carl tried to remember times he had been at the cabin, when the old folks still lived there, as though calling them to memory might make them come alive in the barren landscape. The rotting wooden boxes near the woods would be painted white and set upright. Uncle Mose would be moving among them in his coveralls and veil, bees hovering at his side. Grandfather would be sitting on the porch steps, soaping the sidesaddle Grandmother used when they rode to church. Without wanting to, Carl turned and looked at the gray headstones beneath the cedar trees.

“Carl! I’m freezing! Are you going to stand up here all day?”

He looked at her for a moment before he realized what she had said. Then he nodded and helped her down the embankment toward the meadow.

Elissa wrinkled her nose at the sight of the cabin. “I don’t suppose there’s any heat,” she said flatly.

“Just a fireplace. Whilden left us some wood.” He had known where to look for it—stacked in a pile by the kindling stump.

As they walked through the garden plot, Elissa stopped to look at a child’s plastic rocking horse, set up as a yard ornament under a leafless dogwood.

“How tacky!” she sighed.

He helped her up the flat rock steps to the porch, and set the suitcases down by Granddad’s whittling bench. “Do you want me to carry you over the threshold?” he asked Elissa as he pushed open the door.

She peered into the darkness and shuddered. “Are there snakes in there?”

“No. If you’ll wait out here, I’ll light the oil lamp so you can see.”

“Oh, all right. Just hurry up!”

He could hear her pacing outside as he fumbled with the chimney of the oil lamp Whilden had left on the table. Finally he succeeded in putting the match to the lamp wick, and the small room glowed in lamplight. He saw that it had been freshly swept—although the window was still streaked with dirt—and a brace of logs had been carefully arranged in the fireplace. A clean quilt in a churn-dasher pattern covered the few shreds of upholstery left on the old sofa. On the table near the woodstove, Whilden had left a jar of coffee, a box of cornflakes, some evaporated milk, and—for decoration—red-berried pyracantha branches in a Mason jar.

“You’d think somebody would have cleaned this place
up,” snapped Elissa in the doorway. She turned her head slowly to study the room, her eyebrows raised.

Carl brought in the suitcases from the front porch. “The bedroom is in there,” he said, leading the way. “I can heat you some well water on the stove if you’d like to wash. First, though, I’m going to get this fire going in the fireplace.”

Elissa sat down on the couch to watch. Carl knelt on the stone hearth, rearranging some of the smaller sticks. “See if you can find some newspapers,” he told her.

“Newspapers?”

“Yes. Or leaves. Anything I can use to get this fire started.”

Elissa began to wander around, looking behind the couch and poking in drawers in the kitchen part of the room. “How about this old calendar on the wall?” she called.

Carl turned to look at the wall decoration: a 1945 calendar with a drawing of a Hying Fortress against an unfurled flag. “No,” he said. “Not that.”

With a sigh of exasperation, Elissa continued to search. “Well, it certainly wasn’t one of your ancestors who discovered fire, Carl! Why don’t you just strike a match and let the logs burn?”

He put a match to one of the smaller sticks, holding it there until it burned his finger, but although the stick glowed tentatively for a few moments, it faded to darkness again. He reached in his pocket for another box of matches.

“Carl, I found some little pieces of cloth. Will they do?”

Elissa held up four short strips of black crêpe. “Are these from a quilt?” she asked.

“Bring them here.” He took them from her outstretched hand. “I haven’t seen these since Grandma died. They’re crêpe for the beehives.”

“The beehives?”

“Yes. For mourning. You have to tell the bees when there has been a death in the family, or else they’ll leave
the hive and start one somewhere else. When Grandma died, Uncle Mose hung these black streamers on each beehive when he told the bees.”

“You’re teasing me!” Elissa protested.

“No. When somebody’s gone, you have to tell the bees they’re not coming back.”

Elissa shook her head. “There are some strange goings-on in your mountains,” she said.

Carl tucked one of the streamers away in the pocket of his jeans. He looked at her for a moment. “Well,” he said at last, “I guess I’d better start this fire.”

She answered the tone, rather than the words. “Carl! Are you angry with me?”

“Guess I’ll go out and gather up some leaves for kindling.” He started to get up.

“Carl! Please don’t go yet!” There was a catch in her voice, and she began to pace, not looking at him as she spoke. “I understand about your wanting me to see where you grew up and all, but I’m not used to this! I just didn’t know what to expect! I mean, you said
cabin
, but this isn’t like the cabins I’ve stayed in on ski trips! Carl, this is our honeymoon! I had to tell people we were going to Aspen, because how could I possibly explain that you wanted to come and stay in—this?”

He held another match to the sticks, concentrating on the feeble light in his hand.

“You dragged me up here and ruined my new boots—and for what? A shack with no water, no lights, and no heat!” She sat down on the arm of the sofa and sobbed. “I married an engineer, not a—a hillbilly!”

Carl watched the spark in the fireplace until it flickered out. “It’s all right, Elissa. We’ll leave in the morning. We’ll go wherever you want.”

She managed a moist smile. “Aspen?” she quavered.

“Sure. Aspen. Fine.”

“Oh, thank you, Carl! Things will be all right when we get back where we belong. You’ll see!”

He brushed off the legs of his pants. “I’ll go out and get those leaves now.”

“Do you want me to come along?”

“No. I won’t be long.”

He stood on the porch and looked at the quarter moon webbed in branches on the ridge until his eyes became accustomed to the dark. When the black shapes in the yard had rearranged themselves into familiar objects—a tree, a wagon wheel—he began to walk toward the back garden at the edge of the woods. Tomorrow he would stop at the farm and tell Whilden they were going. Maybe he’d send him something from California. Elissa would be all right when they got back. He pictured her at their glass-topped table pouring wine into Waterford goblets. She would be blond and tanned from a day of sailing, and she would tease him when he alternated Vivaldi and Ernest Tubb on the stereo. Elissa didn’t belong here, but … He tried to picture Roseanne Shull entertaining his engineer friends in the glass room over the Bay. It was time to go back.

He had reached the end of the garden. Glancing back at the cabin, Carl tried to remember how long he had been walking. Elissa would be impatient. It was time to gather the leaves and go back to her. He looked down at the abandoned beehive at his feet, the last of Uncle Mose’s collection. He had to go back. Pulling the black streamer from his pocket, he laid it gently on the box, and hurried away.

I
SQUINTED BACK
at the glass double door of Taylor High. Despite the glare of the afternoon sun and the glares of departing seniors, who kept jostling me back and forth as they passed, I saw Carol Lee’s grinning face in the doorway. She was twitching with excitement. I could tell by the way she was hugging her notebook as if it were a teddy bear and the way the ponytails over her ears bobbed up and down. She kept looking all around, obviously for me, so I prepared to be bored. By the time she fought her way through the crowd and reached the bottom step, I had an expression of utter disdain.

“Guess what, Elizabeth!” she said in tones of breathless excitement.

“I cannot imagine,” I said wearily. Trying to guess what Carol Lee Jenkins was excited about was always an exercise in futility. It could be anything from a B on a biology lab quiz to Neil Sedaka’s using her name in a song. (I kept telling her that she was not entitled to take “Oh! Carol” personally. Fat lot of good that did; she mooned over it for weeks.)

“There’s the cutest boy whose locker is right across from mine! I just noticed him.”

“Oh? Who is he?” I was only slightly curious.

“I don’t know. I think he’s a senior, though. He has the
same lunch period as mine. I bumped into him after second period.”

I started to say “Accidentally?” and then thought better of it. Actually, I didn’t want to know. Encouraging Carol Lee only increases her intensity. Instead I said, “What does he look like?”

“Well, he’s kind of hard to describe, but he’s very cute. He has feathery brown hair and wire-rimmed glasses.”

“Incredible,” I said. She was too wound up to hear my sarcasm, but mentally I applauded my efforts.

“There he is. Coming out over there! Look! No—over
there
, stupid!”

I sniffed loudly and purposely stared in the opposite direction. “Good grief!” I hissed. “Do you
have
to point?”

“Look!” she pleaded.

I dutifully turned, expecting to see the president of the school or the star football player. Carol Lee was just idiotic enough to flip over somebody like that, but the object of her affections was not one of the school’s superstars. “You mean the one who’s bouncing?”

“Hey, yeah,” Carol Lee took only a moment to consider my description before she cheerfully agreed. “That’s exactly what it is: he’s bouncing.”

I’d never seen the boy with the weird gait before. I would have remembered that walk. He sort of loped along, bobbing up at every other step, like a rubber duck caught in the current of a bathtub drain. He was nice-looking in an ordinary kind of way: not too tall, not muscle-bound, definitely not a jock. He walked by himself, instead of surrounded by a clump of laughing madras-and-Weejun-clad companions, so he wasn’t one of the popular kids, into school politics and serious partying. All the candid shots in the yearbook seemed to be of the same eight people, laughing and posing prettily, with every hair in place, and he wasn’t one of them. He wore a plaid sport shirt and tan chinos, instead of a black turtleneck and
black jeans, which meant that he wasn’t one of the “posturing poets for peace” crowd, either. I couldn’t place him in the rigid social hierarchy of Taylor High. He was just a guy who happened to be in school here.

I wondered what had made Carol Lee notice him in the first place. Of course, there is no telling what will attract Carol Lee to a guy; her affections are as random as tornadoes, and of similar duration. She likes to build souls for mysterious strangers; I suppose getting to know someone would spoil the effect. For one entire bewildering week in eighth grade, though, she actually had a crush on my brother Bill. Even she recognized the absurdity in that, and after a couple of chances to observe him closely, while she was visiting me, she gave it up. Bill would not notice someone flirting with him unless she used a flamethrower, and having lived a few doors down from him for most of her life, Carol Lee found it hard to fantasize about Bill as Mr. Wonderful. As I kept reminding her: she knew better.

I looked at her latest victim with clinical interest. Being a freshman, I knew by some sixth sense that the bouncer was definitely a senior, but despite that aura of upperclassman grandeur, he looked like a big kid. Except for the oversized glasses, he had a round cherub face and a pleasant, if absentminded, expression.