Foggy Mountain Breakdown and Other Stories (9 page)

It had been no use trying to talk about it to Ramer either. They had been married a year now, and already the talk had run out. Used to be, Ramer would listen to her way of looking at things, her dreaming out loud, but now when she tried to talk to him, he’d look at her for a minute and then go back to what he was doing. It wasn’t all his fault, though. Being out of work was hard on a man’s pride. When he took her high school diploma down off the wall, she hadn’t said anything, because she knew it was reminding him that he’d quit in tenth grade, and maybe if he hadn’t he’d be working. Things had been different when he had the job in the sawmill. He’d wanted her to finish high school before the wedding and at graduation he’d showed up in his white tie and suit coat and had taken her out to dinner at the Beef Barn to celebrate. Those were happy times. They talked about her getting a typing job in town so that they could buy a new truck and maybe a dish-shaped antenna for the television. He had let her go and get the birth control pills at the clinic, so they could save up and have a few things before the babies started to arrive. But that was before. Now if she
even brought home a book from the bookmobile, he accused her of showing off her education. So Franchette had given up reading and started a quilt. Sometimes she thought something had died inside Ramer, and that he’d be damned if he’d let it live anywhere else.

That morning Ramer had been staring out the kitchen window, same as always. The want ads page of the
Scout
lay crumpled beside his coffee mug, ready to be thrown out with the coffee grounds. First thing after breakfast (oatmeal mostly; eggs at the first of the month), Franchette would clear up the dishes and Ramer would run his finger down the want ads. It never took him very long to go through them. Since the mine shut down and the sawmill laid off, there weren’t any jobs; and if there was one—say, painting a barn—there were twenty people trying to get it, and the one closest related to the barn owner got hired on. So far that hadn’t been Ramer. He was staring out at the pasture and the hills beyond as if he were looking for deer to come down the ridge, but he wasn’t seeing. Franchette cleared up the breakfast dishes in silence.

No use trying to talk to him. No use, either, asking for the want ads. She’d tried that when he first got laid off, and he’d given her a cold, dead look and said: “What’s the matter, Miss High and Mighty? You want to be the boss of this family now?” She’d snapped back that it would be better than the welfare, and Ramer had left the house and hadn’t come back for three hours. After that, she’d try to sneak and read them before she put them in the garbage, but it hadn’t been any use. Ramer had seen to that.

“I’m going to kill that damned chicken!” Ramer had shouted, bringing his fist down hard on the kitchen table.

Franchette wanted to tell him to leave it be. It wasn’t doing any harm this early in the spring. But she knew that taking up for it would only make him madder. Anyway, she didn’t think he could catch it; that old hen knew about people, at least enough to stay out of range. She
was a scraggly old Red, gone wild from somebody’s farm, and living on whatever she could forage. Wasn’t enough meat on her to make a mouthful; anybody could see that. All winter she’d clucked and rambled across their yard, a friendly sight to Franchette, and to Ramer a sign of one more thing he couldn’t control. Sometimes he would go out and shy rocks at her, but he never came close to a hit, and the next day, she’d be back like nothing had happened.

A couple of days after the first thaw, the hen had showed up with one puny chick following behind her—probably the only survivor of an early nest. They’d pecked and cackled at each other in the patches of late snow, while Ramer sat at the window and watched them, day after day.

He never made any move to catch the pair of them, and never said anything about their presence in the yard. He just watched them with eyes like slits. Franchette thought Ramer might be easing up toward the old hen, seeing as how he was going to be a father himself in a few months’ time, but that hope had ended today. He must have been planning it for a couple of days, since he put the wooden crate on the front porch and the gun by the front door.

He hadn’t said anything else after the first outburst. He just grabbed the half-eaten toast from Franchette’s plate and walked out into the yard. Franchette watched him from the window. He stood there stock-still in his work clothes, no coat or gloves, and waited for the hen to come closer. Then he threw down a piece of bread. The hen cocked her head at him, like she didn’t like what she saw. She bustled away toward the trees, but her chick hadn’t learned better. It came up to see what had fallen. Ramer tossed a smaller piece of bread and backed up toward the porch. The chick followed him at a careful distance, gulping down bread crumbs, until Ramer was on the porch, tossing crumbs into the flower bed by the steps. The hen came a few yards out of the trees and shrieked at
her baby, but it was too dumb or too hungry to hear her. Finally, Ramer dumped the rest of the bread crumbs into the flower bed and eased the wooden crate toward the edge of the porch. When the chick bent down to peck the bread, he leaned out and slammed the crate down on top of it. Franchette put her fist in her mouth to keep from yelling at him to let it loose. She thought he would wring its neck then and there, but instead he got up and slammed into the house.

“What did you want to do that for?” she asked when he got inside.

“You’ll find out,” he said without looking at her. He was watching the crate.

The chick had found it couldn’t get out, and was flapping around inside, screaming in terror. You could see it through the wooden slats, thrashing against the top and sides. The hen could see it, too. She answered its cries with distressed sounds of her own and edged nearer the box. Every step or so, she’d cock her head and look up at the house where Ramer waited, and she’d back up a few feet, but the chick’s cries always pulled her closer. It took a good five minutes for her to get to the crate. The chick’s cries were coming louder than ever, and she circled the crate, peering in at it and screeching.

Ramer picked up the gun and eased open the door.

“Oh, Ramer, don’t!” Franchette whispered, grabbing his sleeve.

“I guess that settled it,” he said, grinning at her, and he was gone.

She wished she had gone back to the kitchen and not watched Ramer level the gun at the frantic hen. The hen had looked away from the crate when he came out; she had to have seen the gun, but she stayed there by the crate as if it didn’t matter. He got her with one shot. The chick was still shrieking inside the crate when Ramer picked up its mother’s body and carried it off to the shed to dress it out. He would scald off the feathers and gut it, and then
he’d bring it to the house for Franchette to cook. Franchette knew that if she ever tried to eat that hen, she’d never be done with vomiting, but that wasn’t why she had run.

It was the way Ramer had grinned when he said “I guess that settled it.” It had puzzled her for a while, trying to think what it reminded her of. She had been setting the kettle on to boil when it came to her. After she’d asked for the want ads that time, and then gotten Della to ask her uncle if he could use another waitress, Ramer had told her to wait till after Christmas to start to work, and she’d been happy that he’d taken it so well. It had almost been like old times again for a couple of weeks. Ramer had been so loving again. He’d thrown away her birth control pills, because they cause cancer, he said. And he told her he’d use something to make it safe. He never had, though. And when around Christmastime, she’d known she was pregnant, he smiled just that same funny way, and said that settled it. She was going to be a mother. She couldn’t work. No wife of his was going to leave her kid and go to work. He didn’t seem very happy about the baby, though; he never wanted to talk about what to name it, or anything. He’d just say that she had to stay home and look after it.

It wasn’t until she saw him shoot the hen today that she understood what he’d done and why. It was like the story about Solomon: when the king offered to cut the disputed baby in two, and the real mother was willing to give it up rather than see it killed. That poor old hen had been willing to do anything to save her baby. And Ramer had tried to make her give up her life, the chance to make something of herself, using their baby as a weapon. But Ramer was no Solomon; he would have cut the baby in two, just to make sure that everyone was equally unhappy.

Ramer hadn’t even noticed her when she came in the shed. She had been crying, but they were silent tears. By the time she had walked from the kitchen out to the shed, she wasn’t angry anymore, just sorrowful that everything
had turned out so wrong, and that Ramer had turned into somebody she had to escape from. The gun had been propped up against the wheelbarrow; he didn’t even turn around when she picked it up. He was intent on his butchering, and his hands were red to the wrists. Franchette walked around in front of him, balancing the gun around her swollen belly. He did look up then, just as she fired. She put the gun in his hands, and went back to the house to wash away the blood. The hen’s blood and Ramer’s were all mixed together on her hands.

She spent the walk to Della’s house taking deep breaths, trying to feel calm again, and thinking how she should react when she got home that afternoon and discovered that Ramer had shot himself in the shed while cleaning his gun. Maybe she should be real upset, and then say that she couldn’t sit around the house all day dwelling on the tragedy, and that a job would take her mind off things.

She stopped at Della’s mailbox to catch her breath. In the white tube labeled
Scout
was a rolled-up newspaper like the one she’d left behind on the breakfast table. Franchette eased it out and carried it up the walk to Della’s front door. On the way to town she was going to read the want ads.

I
T HAPPENED ON
no particular day—not close enough to Christmas or his birthday for Sam to mark the time. It was warm, though, because he was playing outside, and there were white flowers on the tree in Aunt Till’s yard. Her cat Old Painter lay tucked in the hedge, keeping one yellow eye on the birds wobbling on the clothesline. He scarcely moved when Sam crept close to his hiding place and snapped a twig from the hedge. Sam was thinking about elephants.

Dad ought to be home soon. Maybe he could get him to tell the story again. Sam walked to the ditch at the edge of the yard and looked down the gravel pike toward town. No one in sight; it was too early yet for Dad to have walked the three miles home from the machine shop. The ghost train had just rattled past on the tracks behind the house.

When the family first rented the white frame house, the year Sam was three, it was supposed to be haunted. Pictures fell off the wall for no reason; dishes rattled on the shelf and sometimes fell. Something white had been seen at night moving behind the house. A few weeks after they moved in, their neighbor “Aunt” Till had been hanging out her washing and had called across the hedge to pass the time of day with Sam’s mother. The two women
met at the privet hedge, and Aunt Till talked a mile a minute. Addie, who like all Solitary McCrorys lived in mortal fear of being talked at, stood twisting her apron until she came up with something to say. “What about them ghosts?”

She started to recite the peculiar goings-on, but by the time she finished Aunt Till was smiling and shaking her head.

“Shoot far,” she said. “When them heavy coal drags come south or the time freight goes by headin’ north, that whole little house of yourn purt near shakes itself to pieces. No wonder yer pictures fall. You’ll fall out of bed if you ain’t keerful.”

But the white phantom out back?

Aunt Till studied about it. “Well,” she allowed, “sometimes of an evening I go out back there in my nightgown, looking for that no-good rascal Old Painter.”

They weren’t bothered by haints after that, though Old Painter continued to roam and squall. They took to calling that northbound freight the Ghost Train, first as a family joke, and then from force of habit.

Sam was twisting the hedge twig into the damp ground, trying to make it stand up by itself. He pulled the leaves off the lower part of the stem to give himself a better grip. After a few more turns the stick found a wobbly purchase in the wet earth. Sam scooped up a handful of dirt and patted it around the base of the twig. He wondered if it would take root if he left it long enough, like Grammaw Hemrick’s switch. Every time they went up home to Preachin’ Grampaw’s, Sam would stare at the mulberry tree in the front yard, and try to picture Grammaw as a young bride from Sinking Creek riding sidesaddle over the mountains with a young black-haired Preachin’ Grampaw.

He must have heard tell a dozen times how she got off her horse at her husband’s homeplace and stuck that riding switch in the ground in the front yard, where it grew
into a mulberry tree with limbs strong enough to support him and Jamie both for berry-picking. Sam liked going up-home even if he was a little scared of his stern old grandfather. The house was always full of grown-up uncles, and there was Jamie, the youngest, who was only two years older than Sam, even if he was an uncle. That mulberry tree was the least of the wonders up in Pigeon Roost. The uncles had rigged up a generator in the barn and made their own electricity with creek water, so that the old homeplace had real electric lights, while Sam’s parents’ house like the rest of those in town was still using oil lamps. Sam liked to hear the uncles tell how they rigged up the old waterwheel on the gristmill with the materials Lewis brought back from up north, and how they wired up the house, the barn, the outhouse, the chicken shed, and even the backyard and put in electric lights. Then Francis would tell one of his stories about coon-hunting or bee-tracking. He always had a couple of hives in white boxes down near the creek. Last, and best, was Sam’s daddy’s turn. Wesley, the town-dweller now, would allow as how it was all right to track coons or play with your mechanical toys, but he was a man of experience: he’d been there when they hanged the elephant. Sometimes he’d even get Grammaw to take down the family album and he’d turn to a picture of himself and announce: “That was the day they done it.” The photograph showed a solemn young man with the Hemrick cheekbones staring into the camera. It was a close shot of his head and shoulders against a gray sky; there was no sign of the elephant or its railroad gallows, but Sam never forgot which picture was the crucial one, proving that his daddy had actually been there.