Sharyn McCrumb - Foggy Mountain Breakdown and Other Stories

Chataqua County was lambs in the spring, and Ruritan apple butter, and the garden club. One Tuesday a month in the Sunday-school room of the Mt. Olive Baptist Church, two dozen ladies would meet to compare flower arrangements, discuss civic projects (like taking baked goods to the senior-citizen home), and catch up on all the news. It had taken Miriam a good while to follow it all, being the only one “not from around here,” but she was beginning to get it sorted out now.

Miriam’s favorite part of the garden club meetings, though, was the plant lore. The older women, especially, were full of tales about healing plants, and herbal teas, and old traditions. “You know why they’s a mountain ash planted beside most every door in Scotch Creek?” they’d ask her. “Why, because the mountain ash is the American kin of the rowan tree back in Scotland. My grandmother used to say that in the old days, folk thought a rowan would protect you from the evil spirits, so them Scots that came over here went on a-planting ’em by the doorway.”

Miriam was always afraid that someone from Sociology with a tape recorder, or one of the Earth Shoe People, would find out about the garden club and horn in, but so far they hadn’t. Last November, when Kathryn was dating the latest divorce-casualty in Appalachian Studies, she had suggested that they drive out for the meeting, but Miriam had put her off by reminding her that it was hunting season, and perhaps not entirely safe. The matter had rested there.

“Sorry I’m late,” said Jayne, not sounding sorry in the least. “Some guy needed a reference, and I could not get him off the phone.” Jayne was the humanities reference librarian, a job she described as “having to suffer fools gladly.” She was in her not-to-be-mistaken-for-a-secretary outfit: navy blue straight skirt and blazer, blue tailored blouse, red foulard tie. Sleek, short haircut; no mascara. Sometimes, Southern-born professors over sixty absentmindedly called her “dear,” but everyone else got the message.

She sat down and looked meaningfully at Kathryn before picking up the menu. Uh-oh , thought Miriam.

“So,” said Jayne, glancing through the salad list. “What have you been talking about?”

“Nothing much,” said Kathryn. She meant, I haven’t said anything yet .

Miriam said, “I think we’d better order. I need to get back.”

Kathryn glanced at her watch. “It is getting late.”

The waitress appeared then, and the next few minutes were occupied with detailed instructions-“Iced tea. Very light ice.” “Is that low sodium?”-and so on. Miriam toyed with a pink packet of saccharin while these proceedings were taking place. She was trying to think about something else.

“How is Andrew?” asked Jayne, trying to make it sound perfunctory.

“He’s fine,” said Miriam. He doesn’t know that I know. I wondered if he suspected that you did . Andrew had forgotten that she had taken the university computer course for staff. As a professor, he had an electronic mailbox, and one day (just for fun?) she had accessed his “mail” on her terminal. The password was easy to figure out. True to his specialization, Andrew alternated between aquifer and mineral . Miriam did not know what she had expected to find on the university computer system. Love letters, perhaps, since Andrew had been preoccupied lately. She supposed, after all, that electronic mail was just as private as the other kind. Or just as un-private.

So she had found out about Andrew’s project weeks ago, and now that it was nearly to the press-release stage, Kathryn must have learned about it from gossip in the department of… Andrew’s co-conspirator. He had not discussed it with her, of course. He was going to present her with a fait accompli. He would make a lot of money from the sale, and as the letters from the other professor had stated, “There weren’t many people to be considered.” Chataqua County was not populous. She knew that sooner or later the weekly luncheon would be devoted to a discussion of Andrew and his project, but Miriam did not want to “articulate her feelings” with Kathryn and Jayne. They’d be on the same side for once, but she preferred to handle matters in her own way.

She had already talked the matter over with the garden club. A couple of the older ones had to have things like “toxic chemicals” and “groundwater” explained to them, but finally they understood why she was so upset about Andrew’s offer to sell the farm to the university for a landfill. She told them about some of the chemicals that certain departments couldn’t dump down the sink anymore, and what had happened to the pond on campus when they used it for dumping.

After that there had been complete silence for a good three minutes. And then the talk returned to gardening. At first Miriam thought that the issue had been too complex for them to understand. She wondered if she ought to explain about cancer and crop contamination, and all the other dangers. Listening to their calm discussion of plants, she thought that they had just given up considering the problem altogether, but looking back on it later, she understood.

“Cohosh sure does look nice in a flower arrangement, doesn’t it?” said Mrs. Calloway. “Nice big purple berries that look like a cross between blueberries and grapes. There’s some up the hill behind our place.”

“You wouldn’t want to use them in a salad, though,” said Mrs. Dehart thoughtfully. “Bein’ poison and all. Course, they might not kill you.”

“We lost a cow to eating chokecherry leaves once,” said Mrs. Fletcher. “It almost always kills a cow if you let one in a field with chokecherry. I never heard tell of a human getting hold of any, though. We got some growing in our woods, but it’s outside the fence.”

“That ain’t nothin’ to hemlock,” sniffed Serena Walkenshaw. “Looks just like parsley, if you don’t know any better. They’re kin, of course. Wild carrot family, same as Queen Anne’s lace. But that hemlock beats all you ever seen for being… toxic ?”

Miriam nodded. “I don’t suppose you find it much around here.”

Serena Walkenshaw shrugged. “I believe I saw some in the marsh near that little creek on your place. Course, it might have been parsley…”

Miriam felt a tug on her sleeve and looked up to see Kathryn peering at her intently. “Are you all right, Miriam? You’re just staring at your salad.”

Miriam smiled. “I was just thinking that I had to fix a salad for Andrew tonight, before I go off to the garden club.”

Jayne laughed. “The garden club ! What can you possibly get out of that?”

“Recipes,” said Miriam softly.

“SHE LOOKS A proper murderess, doesn’t she?” said Ernie Sleaford, tapping the photo of a bleached blonde. His face bore that derisive grin he reserved for the “puir doggies,” his term for unattractive women.

With a self-conscious pat at her own more professionally lightened hair, Jackie Duncan nodded. Because she was twenty-nine and petite, she had never been the object of Ernie’s derision. When he shouted at her, it was for more professional reasons-a missed photo opportunity or a bit of careless reporting. She picked up the unappealing photograph. “She looks quite tough. One wonders that children would have trusted her in the first place.”

“What did they know, poor lambs? We never had a woman like our Erma before, had we?”

Jackie studied the picture, wondering if the face were truly evil, or if their knowledge of its possessor had colored the likeness. Whether or not it was a cruel face, it was certainly a plain one. Erma Bradley had dumpling features with gooseberry eyes, and that look of sullen defensiveness that plain women often have in anticipation of slights to come.