Black Mountain Breakdown (17 page)

There’s another knock on the door and it’s not Susie this time either. It’s Odell, asking if her upstairs toilet is still working good; he fixed it for her last week.

“It’s fine, Odell,” Lorene says. “I sure do appreciate you fixing it,” and then, surprising herself, she says, “I was just fixing to have a cup of coffee. Why don’t you come on in?”

Odell shifts from foot to foot outside her back door. “Well,” he says finally, “I guess I wouldn’t mind,” and he
comes in and sits down in the rocker gingerly, as if the whole bulk of him might break it down.

“It’s real nice in here,” he says after a while. Odell turns his hat around and around in his hands. He’s used to doing for other people, not having them do for him.

Lorene fixes the coffee, still surprised at herself. When she looks over at Odell, he seems to fill her whole conversation area. She gets the coffee and sits down across from him, offers him Carnation and sugar, but he says he takes it black.

“Well, Lorene,” Odell says, leaning back so the chair creaks and looking at her, “I been meaning to talk some business with you anyway.”

“Is that a fact?” Lorene says easily, but her whole face sharpens up. Odell is nobody’s fool.

“It’s about all that land up at Dry Fork,” Odell goes on, his words coming out slow since he’s not used to sitting in kitchens and talking to blondheaded women, especially not his half brother’s wife. “You know I’ve got some of it, you’ve got Grant’s part of it now, Nora and Grace and Devere has got some of it, and all together it adds up to where you would be surprised at how much it is.”

“Well?” Lorene snaps. She can’t stand anybody beating around the bush.

“Well, I’ve been having people ask me about it lately, just inquiring, you might say. Talking about leasing it, or some of it.”

“Lord, I thought that was all over with,” Lorene says.

“Maybe it is and maybe it’s not.” Odell finishes up his coffee. “There’s some now saying that the price of coal is
going up again, you can’t tell how high. They say it’s because of the energy crunch and the A-rabs. I don’t know about that. But what I want to tell you, Lorene, is this—if anybody comes around asking you about that land, hold off. Act like you don’t know nothing about it. And I’d appreciate it if you’d let me know, if you wouldn’t mind. If things go like I hear they’re going to, if we can hold on to that and keep it all together, we might stand to get something out of it after all.”

“Is that a fact?” Lorene is all excited; she always did like business.

“Well, I appreciate the coffee,” Odell says, standing, and Lorene stands up, too. Odell grins at her, his gold tooth flashing once. Flustered, Lorene opens the door and Odell leaves. She hears his truck start up.
My, my.
Lorene leans her face against the doorframe. Her heart is just beating away. What if she was to make a fortune, after all these years? It’s never too late, as they say. Lorene goes back over and sits down, flipping the TV on automatically. She has always thought of Odell, if she thought of him at all, as some kind of a big trained bear, Grant’s pet. Now she leans forward and examines the rocker cushions carefully, but she can’t find a speck of dirt, not one. Odell wouldn’t be a bad looking man, either, if he knew how to dress. Lorene is lost in thought when Susie arrives; she doesn’t even know what’s on TV. Menopause, she tells Susie. Lorene says she can feel it coming on. She’s having a hot flash, she says. Susie says she wishes she’d get the menopause herself. That ought to fix Edwin’s little red wagon good, she says.

Crystal and Jubal and Agnes sit out on Agnes’s porch
next door, watching the cars go by. Crystal remembers sitting out here last summer and all the summers before that, and the trumpet vine smells so sweet she thinks she’s going to die. The trumpet vine makes her think about Mack, about sitting out here with him in the dark. Crystal can’t see Jubal very well right now, but he intrigues her. There’s something brand new about him, that shiny cast overlaid on him like he’s been dipped in gold. They talk a little bit about school, about Chester Lester, now out on parole.

“I tell you, I just cross the street if I see him coming,” Agnes says. “It’d be all right by me if they kept him in there for the rest of his life.”

“Me, too,” Crystal says, although she doesn’t really mean it. Chester Lester excites her, knowing how bad he is, his flat white monkey face.

“I mean it, they ought to lock him back up,” Agnes goes on. “You all know how bad he is! You remember when he tied Crystal up and put those frogs all over her? Why, she was tied up for an hour.” And I untied her, Agnes thinks. Lord knows if I hadn’t come along!

Crystal shivers and says nothing. Jubal is silent, too, and they hear some hollering out in the night by the Esso station, then quiet, the swishing sounds of the passing cars. Crystal wonders where Mack is and what he’s doing right now. It almost makes her cry to think what good care he took of his guitar.

“Well, what do
you
think about it?” Agnes presses Jubal in her strident voice. “Why do you reckon they let him out so soon?”

Jubal waits a minute. Then rather self-consciously he
clears his throat. He says, “Chester Lester has got a soul, the way I see it, the same as you and me.”

“Soul, my foot!” Agnes snaps. “He hasn’t any more got a soul than this table here.” Agnes kicks the table.

“Everybody got a soul, Agnes,” Jubal says softly. “And anybody that’s got a soul, they can be saved, they can be changed. I’ve seen it. I know. It’s not ever too late for salvation.”

“Hah!” Agnes snorts, but the hair along Crystal’s arms rises at the sound of Jubal’s voice. It’s something about the way he says things, so gently and so soft, not at all loud or too much in earnest like her uncle Garnett. Crystal feels funny in the pit of her stomach, and the trumpet vine smells sweet.

“That brings me to what I wanted to tell you girls about,” Jubal continues easily, still soft, a disembodied voice coming out of the dark. “We’re having a revival next week. I just wanted to tell you all about it, and tell you you’re welcome to come. It’s going to be outside on the football field, nondenominational. Everybody is welcome to come.”

“I don’t believe I’ll be able to make it,” Agnes says. “I’ve been saved ever since I was ten years old, thank you just the same.”

“Well, think about it,” Jubal says. “We’ve got Fred Lee Sampson, evangelist, he’s coming here all the way from Arkansas, and the Singing Triplets are coming, too.”

“The what?” asks Crystal.

“The Singing Triplets,” Jubal says. “They’re real good. They’ve made two records already.” Crystal has a wild urge to laugh out loud, but she doesn’t.

“Now, listen, Jubal,” Agnes says. “I’m real glad you’re going to be a preacher and all. I think it’s real nice. But I’ve got my own church to go to, and Crystal does, too, and it looks to me like we ought to just stick to our own.” Having delivered this opinion loudly, Agnes begins to rock with a vengeance, so that the creak each time she goes forward is the only sound for a while on the porch.

“Crystal?” Jubal says.

“What time does it start?” Crystal asks.

CRYSTAL DRIVES TO
the opening meeting alone, not mentioning to her mother beforehand where she is going. Lorene is at her Garden Club meeting anyway. Crystal drives slowly through town, stopping for the single traffic light, remembering all the rules from the driving booklet. It’s only the third or fourth time she’s driven alone, but Lorene has said she can take the car whenever she wants. Will Lorene be mad? Maybe, when she finds out where Crystal is going. But she did say that, after all. The light turns green, and Crystal steps on the gas. Everybody says that her grand-father Iradell’s wreck was what made them get a traffic light in the first place. Crystal doesn’t know if that’s true or not. She parks in the lot by the football field, puts the keys into her pocketbook, takes her wallet out, and examines the new driver’s license behind its clear plastic cover. “Wt 118, eyes B1.” The picture doesn’t look a thing like her. You could never tell she was Miss Black Rock High from that. The picture doesn’t even look like anybody she’s ever seen before. Crystal leans back on the white Naugahyde seat
of Lorene’s Buick and lets the picture and the billfold slide back into her purse. A car pulls into the parking lot beside her and she breathes some dust, sneezes. She feels funny at the edges of her stomach. She’s got no business being here. She can guess exactly what Lorene will say when she finds out about it. She can imagine how her daddy would have laughed. “I put Jesus in the same category as penicillin,” Grant told her once with that old slow curling grin, “and there’s some that’s allergic to both.” Crystal takes the car keys back out and looks at them. She could always turn around and go home. Except she has the feeling in her stomach, and she has promised Jubal. She feels the way she’s felt before sometimes, like something is going to happen, like she doesn’t know exactly what she’s going to do but she’s pretty sure it will be
something
. After she does it, she’ll know what it is. Crystal gets out of the car.

The enormous tent is set up smack in the middle of the football field, looking peculiar, like a huge, aberrant growth. This is where the football games are, and where she becomes a cheerleader every fall. She used to play hopscotch out here at recess in elementary school. Dust swirls around the edges of the tent, and its flaps flap in the hot, dry breeze. People park in the lot and hurry in, stream in, more people than Crystal could have ever imagined. Stepping over a tangle of electrical wiring, she ducks in, too, joins a whole group of people moving up a narrow dusty aisle and finally finds a folding chair. She looks around. This tent is so big it’s like a world in here. There are three main poles and lots of smaller poles holding it up. Away up there where the poles hit the canvas top, Crystal can see little circles of light-blue
sky. Cone-shaped speakers are attached to the poles. Wires run everywhere. The tent will hold about five hundred people and it’s almost full now, but people keep coming in. Here and there Crystal sees people she knows, mostly country people; only a few of Lorene’s friends are here. In the front center of the tent is a stage. The stage holds a portable organ, a bass fiddle, a set of sequined drums. It holds a pulpit exactly like the one her uncle Garnett preaches from at the Methodist Church, solid oak. In the very center of the stage is a giant plyboard cross, painted gold. It’s at least twenty-five feet high. Somebody has drilled holes all over it, and a colored light bulb has been placed in each hole. These lights are not shining now.

Night is falling fast outside. A redheaded woman starts playing the organ on stage. She plays beautifully, long rippling runs on a jazzed-up version of “Nearer My God to Thee,” and the whole big crowd goes quiet. Crystal looks to her right and her left: a high-school couple on one side holding hands, having a date for the revival; a big, straggle-haired woman on the other side, holding a tiny little sleeping baby in a dirty pink knitted cap. Crystal cranes forward with the rest of them as people come out on the stage and occupy the chairs that have already been placed there, as the lights in the tent go dim and spotlights are trained on the stage.

Melville Reed, the preacher of the Holy Pentecostal Church of God, Jubal’s church, comes forward first. He is a slight balding man with bulging eyes and a goiter, but he speaks straight and forcefully into the microphone and his voice echoes through the whole tent.

“Praise the Lord!” he shouts, and Crystal jumps. “When I look out there tonight, and I see every seat filled in this great tent, a great cry rises up inside me. Praise the Lord!” he shouts again, and several people in the folding chairs shout, too. “When we were planning this revival, we were figuring the size of the tent, and some of us was holding out for a big tent and some of us was holding out for a little one. And when we called up Brother Fred Lee Sampson on the telephone and asked him what we ought to do about it, he said, ‘Rent me the biggest tent you can find, and trust in the Lord to fill it up!’ and He has done it, brothers and sisters, He has filled it up!” A lot of people shout, “Amen!” and “Yes!” at this. Crystal begins to feel uncomfortable. But she knows she can’t leave now.

“Oh, I look out there, and I see every seat full, and I can feel the spirit moving already, brothers and sisters, I can feel it in this great crowd here tonight, I can feel it in this tent. I look out there and I see so many dear beloved faces, and I see new faces, too, hundreds of them, and I say unto all of you, get ready! Get ready to open up your hearts tonight, brothers and sisters, and let Jesus Christ come in. He’s waiting. He’s waiting right outside this tent tonight. Think about it, beloved. It’s up to you. It’s up to you! And now, to start the old ball rolling, let’s hear from the Holiness Youth Choir of our own Holy Pentecostal Church of God.”

The youth choir comes forward on the stage to sing two numbers, accompanied by Miss Louise Yates on the Hammond organ, but Crystal doesn’t really pay too much attention. What if she had a wreck? What if she
did
die in a wreck
on the way home tonight? Fear shoots straight through the middle of her like a sweet sharp knife.

After the youth choir, Jubal Thacker leads them all in prayer, so white-faced and high-voiced that several women are moved to tears. Then Brother Reed is back to announce the Singing Triplets and out they come, and at first everybody is disappointed. Just from the sound of their name, you would think they would be young and cute, teenagers at the most. But these singing triplets are about forty years old. They bound out onto the stage, big hefty men with greased-back black hair and white long-sleeved open-neck shirts and eyeglasses on, one of them with an electric guitar slung around his neck, and everybody is disappointed. But then they start to sing, and one of them gets on the bass and another on the drums, and they go into “When the Saints Go Marching In” so loud it fills the whole tent. One of the triplets has a real low voice. He throws in “Oh Lordy” every now and then, way down low. They do “If Jesus Came to Your House.” Then they lay down their instruments and sing “Amazing Grace” without any music, just their loud strong voices harmonizing, and several people are crying by the time they bounce off the stage.