Black Mountain Breakdown (11 page)

“Daddy?” Crystal puts down her overnight bag and goes into the front room. “Daddy?” she says again. She’s still wearing her coat.

Grant lies on his pillows, one hand on his chest with the fingers curled like he’s trying to hold on to something, the other arm hanging off the sofa with the fingers open and limp. His neck is at a funny angle, hanging slack over to one side against the pillow. When Crystal goes over to straighten his covers, he does not move. He doesn’t open his eyes. Crystal takes his hand, presses the fingers together, rubs them. He doesn’t move his fingers; he won’t hold her hand like he used to. Crystal lets go of his hand and touches his cheek, softly, her fingers fluttering over the skin. His skin is still warm to the touch, but he’s dead and she knows it now. Of course he’s dead; he’s not even breathing. It’s funny how that’s the last thing she looks for. No breath: under the blue silk robe, his chest is still, so still it’s almost sunken. Crystal sits down on the floor where she always sits, and leans back against the sofa. Back and forth, back and forth she rubs the end of the tie of the blue silk robe between her fingers, back and forth, and the
whole world falls away from her by degrees until nothing at all is left.

LORENE COMES
home thirty minutes later, yodeling in at the door, “Crys-
tal
? Crys-
tal
? You back, honey?” Lorene takes her coat off, puts it over the back of a kitchen chair, and claps her hands together briskly to get the cold out of them. She glances around her kitchen. It’s all clean, all straight, everything from breakfast dried and put away; she did that before she went over to the McClanahans’ to look at the new book of spring patterns from Simplicity that Agnes’s mama sent off for. Little specks of dust dance in the shaft of light that comes in the kitchen window. The whole house is still and quiet. Out of the corner of her eye, Lorene notices something: Crystal’s overnight bag on the floor by the wall. “Crys-
tal
?” she yells. Dust twirls softly in the path of light and nobody answers her call.

Without hesitation or haste, Lorene crosses her spotless kitchen to Grant’s door and pushes it open and goes in. It takes a minute for her eyes to adjust to the dark. When they do, she gulps in her breath sharply and one hand flies straight up to her mouth. She has always known she would come in here one day and see this, find Grant dead. He’s had death in him for years, as plain as the nose on your face. Lord, Lord, she prays, I hope you have got some kind of a place for Grant. Since he never found a place on this earth, she adds.
Amen.
Lorene leans against the wall for a minute, remembering of all things the first house they lived
in, one of Iradell’s company houses up on Dry Fork, her mother’s old brass bed with the log cabin quilt, and the wide pine planks on the floor. Young then, Grant fascinated her. She never knew anybody like him, she who was such a worker and lived by the clock. She never knew anybody so full of dreams. Well. Lorene straightens up and smooths her skirt. What’s done is done. But you can’t throw the baby out with the bath water, and all the things she has to do now come crowding into her head. First, Crystal Renée.

Lorene goes over to the sofa. Crystal sits on the floor, looking down, holding one end of the belt of Grant’s robe. Crystal’s hair divides evenly down the back of her head and falls down in front of her shoulders. When Lorene leans over, she can see the white line of scalp in the part at the nape of Crystal’s neck. This makes her want to cry in a way that nothing else does. But she doesn’t cry. She puts her hand gently on Crystal’s head.

“Come on, honey,” she says. “Let’s go.”

Crystal neither moves nor answers, though her fingers work at the silk.

“Crystal,” Lorene says in a firmer voice, “your daddy has passed away, honey. You come on and lie down. We have to call the doctor, we have to do a lot. Or you could go over to Agnes’s for a little while right now.”

Crystal doesn’t move.

“Come on, now,” Lorene says quite firmly. “Get up from there.”

Crystal doesn’t move.

Lorene shakes her daughter’s shoulder hard. “You come on, now,” she says.

Crystal’s long hair swings back and forth in the halflight. She won’t look up at Lorene.

“Well.” Lorene snaps on a light. The room grows suddenly smaller and dirtier, becomes any old neglected room. Lorene sees the dust on everything and wonders what people will think. If she can just get Neva over here. If she can just get Crystal to get up from that floor. Grant looks terrible in the light, worse than she had thought he would. At least those eyes are closed.

“Crystal!” she says.

“Yes, ma’am,” Crystal says in a perfectly normal voice. “You go ahead. I’ll just stay here with Daddy, I think.”

Lord God.
Lorene almost runs back into the kitchen, and her fingers shake as she dials the Clip-N-Curl. She knows it’s their busy day. “I need to talk to Neva,” she says when somebody finally answers. “I don’t care if she’s doing a permanent or what she’s doing,” she snaps. “Get her on here.”

But when Neva gets on the line, Lorene can barely speak. “Neva,” she says finally, after Neva has said hello three times in a row, “you’ve got to come over here. Grant has passed away. This morning, I guess. I don’t know. I don’t know exactly. Crystal did. I don’t know. No, I haven’t had a chance to call him yet. I will. OK. I will. But, Neva, you’ve got to come on over, I can’t get Crystal out of there. I don’t know. She was up at Nora and Grace’s spending the night. I don’t know. ’Bye.”

Lorene hangs up the receiver, wipes her hands on her skirt, calls Garnett and Edwin, looks in the phone book and starts dialing again. She has one moment of pure anger after she calls up Bill Hart at the Black Rock Funeral Home.
She might have known Grant would go like this! He always loved to get Crystal all wrought up.

Pretty soon Neva is there, as fast as she can make it from the Clip-N-Curl, along with two of her operators and about half of the people from the beauty shop, all in different stages of getting their hair done. They park in front of the house and come right in and take over.

Before she knows it, Lorene is seated in her rocker with three women hovering over her and one of Neva’s operators, Loretta Hurley, has got two pots of water already boiling on the stove.

“It’d be better if you can cry,” Mrs. Ruby Wright tells Lorene anxiously. Mrs. Ruby Wright’s little eyes are glistening and darting around. “The best thing is to get it all out.” Mrs. Ruby Wright, a member of Lorene’s prayer circle, has three brush rollers on the top of her head and none anywhere else at all. She still wears a Clip-N-Curl towel at her neck.

Loretta, skinny and competent in her blue uniform, steps back from the stove. “Anybody want Sanka?” she says.

“You go on and just cry your eyes out if you’ve got a mind to,” Mrs. Ruby Wright tells Lorene.

“Sometimes it’s a blessing in disguise,” remarks Ludie Compton. “Do you reckon he passed in his sleep?”

“Well, poor thing. He’s been sick so long,” adds Neva’s other operator, Jean Potts, handing some sugar around. She has never seen Grant in her life, but she knows all about him because she has heard it from Neva for years.

Lorene leans back and lets their voices rise up all around her. “You all are so sweet,” she says.

Neva, big and able, appears at the door to the front room.
“I can’t do a thing with her,” she tells Lorene, her voice high-pitched with exasperation. “She’s just sitting in there. She won’t get up for nothing. She won’t even answer me back.”

“Who?” asks Loretta quickly.

“Crystal,” Neva snaps. “Her girl.”

Loretta goes in to see and the others follow, a high tide of voices and then a hush as they enter the front room, and they’re whispering at first when they come back out. “Now, isn’t that the saddest thing?” says Mrs. Ruby Wright.

“Shock,” pronounces Hester Suggs, who used to be a practical nurse with the County Health. “She ought to go right to bed. We need to get her out of there, it’s not healthy.”

Neva takes a deep breath and squares her shoulders. “You just stay right there,” she tells Lorene.

Loretta and Neva and Hester Suggs go in to get Crystal, and then Jean Potts has to go in there, too. Crystal won’t come; she’s fighting them all the way. Finally Neva just picks her up around the waist and hollers at Hester to get her arms and somebody else to get her feet. Loretta, who is as tough as she is skinny, makes a grab for the legs, but Crystal kicks and kicks. She kicks Loretta right in the nose and blood comes out of one nostril. “That’s enough of that,” Loretta says, pulling off Crystal’s saddle oxfords and getting a good hold at last on her legs. Crystal is not very heavy, but she fights like a wildcat all the way as they carry her through the kitchen and finally get her up the stairs and hold her down in her bed. By then Lorene is there, too, leaning over, trying to stroke the face that keeps thrashing so wildly back and forth on the ruffled pillows.

“It’s just shock,” Hester Suggs says again. “I’ve seen it a lot before.”

“Well, it’s better to get it all out,” Mrs. Ruby Wright repeats, but even she looks doubtful as she tries to help them hold Crystal down.

Crystal is embarrassing them all—she won’t stop screaming for Grant. Finally Neva sits on Crystal’s legs and stays there.

“Everything is going to be all right!” Neva shouts at her. “You shut up that hollering, now. That’s not the way to act, Crystal Renée. I’m surprised at you. Look at your poor mother. She doesn’t know what to do, you’re acting so wild.”

“Daddy,” Crystal screams, a weird muffled scream into the pillow, and she keeps on doing it until Dr. Lewis comes. He gives her a shot immediately, and she calms down, goes glassy-eyed and then to sleep. Neva sits on her feet until they are sure she’s asleep.

“Now how about this nose, Doc?” Loretta says. “She like to broke it, I think.”

While the doctor is still upstairs looking at Loretta’s nose, Neva helps Lorene back down and now the whole house is full of people: Agnes’s mama from next door, in her apron; Neva’s silent husband, Charlie, his truck parked out in the road in front of the Thackers’; Edwin Sykes, in a suit, asking everybody if arrangements have been made; his wife, Susie, wet-eyed and shaky beside him; Jubal Thacker’s daddy stiff as a post beside the door; smiling Bill Hart from the funeral home; others. The Reverend Garnett Sykes makes a spectacular entrance, coming in the kitchen door
and taking off his hat with a flourish, lifting wide his arms. “May God have mercy on this house!” he says in a deep voice, and everybody there says amen. “Lorene,” Garnett says, still holding his arms out but lowering them a little, and she goes into them, held and comforted against the big wool coat. “Honey, it’s a blessing,” Garnett says.

Lorene says something about the fit Crystal is taking, and Garnett says time heals all. Upstairs, watched over by Agnes’s mama, Crystal grinds her teeth in sleep.

“We need to clean up that front room some,” Neva says, and several of the women go to help her.

More people come, neighbors from up and down the bottom, men from downtown. A fidgety group of neighborhood children has gathered in the yard at the front of the house. People keep going in to see Grant. Lorene asks them not to at first, but after they get the room cleaned up she lets them all go in. Of course they’re curious. Most of them haven’t set eyes on Grant Spangler for years. Dr. Lewis clears the room for a while and examines Grant.

“Heart failure,” he tells Lorene when he opens the door. “Pure and simple. That virus on top of the emphysema and the cirrhosis.” He adds, “I’m sorry.”

“Well, it’s not your fault,” Neva says.

“No,” adds Lorene.

“No,” Dr. Lewis says, almost absentmindedly, looking around, and a small silence falls. The question of fault almost surfaces but does not; it’s not anybody’s fault, anyway, they know, all of them—nobody’s except Grant’s himself or maybe Iradell’s, but not theirs either, not really: you just never know how things will turn out.

The question of the arrangements is debated; where will he be laid out?

“He never left this room, poor thing,” Susie ventures timidly, but Neva says, “Well, he’s left it
now
,” and that decides it for Lorene. She will lay him out at the funeral home.

“That’s the best,” Hester Suggs assured everybody. “You still have to live here, you know. I know I wouldn’t feel right about sitting in here after I had sat in here with
that
.”

Odell pulls up in the drive in his pickup, still black-faced from the mine, with Nora and Grace in the seat. Nora comes in, nods shortly to everyone, and straightens up the sink. Grace is tearful and trembling. “I had a dream,” she says. “You might even call it a vision.” She looks so frail and weird and old-fashioned in Lorene’s bright kitchen, so different from the women there.

“Don’t you think we should bring him home?” she implores Neva, and then Edwin and Lorene. She means lay him out up at Dry Fork, they see: and it takes the Reverend Garnett Sykes himself to hush her up and explain the arrangements.

Agnes’s mama comes down to say Crystal is awake and will somebody please bring her a Coke or something to drink.

Neva turns up the heat because it’s getting so cold in the house, the way the doors are being opened and shut all the time. Some people leave and others come; they’re bringing food now, too, and Mrs. Thacker lists each dish and who brought it as they come in. Like the others, Mrs. Thacker knows exactly what to do.

Bill Hart is back with the hearse and his two assistants, but Odell won’t let anybody help him carry the body out. Odell acts like he might even hit Garnett Sykes, so everybody stands back while Odell picks up Grant, wrapped in a blanket now, and carries him out to the hearse. Odell’s black eyes are fierce and he mutters wildly under his breath and they all stand back out of his way. It’s hard to watch Odell staggering down the front steps with the body over his shoulder, Grant’s long legs swinging out from under the blanket behind, bony feet bare in the cold. Bill Hart turns away. He could have taken care of it all so tastefully.

Upstairs, there’s another commotion. Crystal has gotten up to go to the bathroom. She has seen the hearse. “Don’t let them take him out of here,” she begs Agnes’s mother. “Please don’t let them take him away.” They call Lorene and she hugs Crystal to her as the black car pulls out, Odell in the front seat with Bill Hart.