Sharyn McCrumb - Foggy Mountain Breakdown and Other Stories

Parting with that rifle was like leaving behind a chunk of himself, but he had decided to go to college, and firearms were not allowed in dormitory rooms. He had tucked it away carefully in the back of his closet, telling himself it was just as well he was leaving it home. After all, somebody might steal it. In a way, somebody did.

He had come home for the first time on the weekend of Thanksgiving. Teachers College was only twenty miles away, but he worked nights and weekends to pay his way, so he missed most of the hunting season. He’d make up for it, he told himself, by spending as much time up in the hills as the folks would allow. When he opened his closet to clean the Winchester his first night home, it was nowhere to be found.

“Mom!” he called. “Where’d you put my gun?”

She had appeared in the doorway, as cold and impassive as ever, and said simply that she had sold it. It was cluttering up her house.

Sam was half Solitary McCrory, and they never were much on arguing. He just put his clothes back in the canvas valise and walked out. The army sent them a form letter when he graduated from boot camp, and a telegram when he was wounded in Normandy. Years later he took to writing a few lines telling them where he was, and about his brief marriage to Mildred, who couldn’t understand that the army came first with him. He sent them a cuckoo clock from Germany one Christmas (Mildred’s idea), and Wesley had gotten a watch from Japan, but they never wrote him back. Neither one of them was much on writing letters. He wondered if Wesley had aged much. Funny, he always pictured him as he had been all those years ago-just a little over forty.

“Well, we’re here!” called Tommy Ray, pumping the horn. “And there’s everybody in the yard, a-waiting on us.”

“Which one… which one is Dad?” asked Sam.

Frances Lee gave her brother time to adjust his memories to the real thing before she tackled him for the talk they had to have. He’d kept calling Lewis’s teenage granddaughter “Frances Lee,” and he’d had to make war talk with the menfolk in the backyard, and tell the women what things were like overseas. Then they’d all gone off to the funeral home to view the body for the last time before tomorrow’s service. But now-finally-the house was quiet. The kinfolk and their covered dishes had disappeared around ten o’clock, leaving them in peace. Wesley was in his room.

She’d settled Wayne in front of the TV and gone out to the porch where Sam was reading this week’s copy of the Clinchfield Scout with a bemused smile.

“Anything interesting?” she asked, curling up on the glider.

He shook his head. “Fred Lanier became a lawyer.”

“On his daddy’s money,” snorted Frances Lee. “If Dad had been a shop foreman making good money, there’s no telling what you coulda done.”

“I did all right,” he said. “Washington is good duty to pull.”

“I guess I did all right, too,” said Frances Lee. “We got two cars and a camper. Leastways, we both got out of these hills.”

Sam smiled. “Like M. L. and Lewis and Tom. The trick is not to come back. But everybody does sooner or later.”

“You thinking about coming back?”

“I don’t know, Fran. Why?”

“Because we’ve got to figure out what to do about Dad.”

She told him how, after fifty years of marriage, he couldn’t even fry an egg, and might be too old to learn. The question was: should they try to hire him a housekeeper, look into retirement communities, or arrange for him to come and live with one of them?

“Washington or Chicago,” said Sam. “That’s a pretty big change for a man his age.”

“Well, he might like it,” snapped Frances Lee. “Lord knows, anything would have to be an improvement after living with Mama all these years. He can finally start to enjoy himself.”

“Okay,” said Sam. “Go get him and we’ll talk about it.”

The straight-backed kitchen chair on the porch was always Wesley’s chair. He sat down in it now, feeling a little like a man asking for a bank loan, in front of these two stern-faced adults who were-and weren’t-his children. Frances Lee was doing most of the talking, but he couldn’t quite make out what they wanted. It was too soon after… the other… for him to think about anything else. It had to do with his future, though.

“Of course, we want you to do whatever will make you happy, Dad,” his daughter was saying. Her voice used to be like her mother’s, but she had a Yankee accent now, and the resemblance was gone.

“Happy…” he echoed, catching her phrase.

“We don’t want to force you into anything.” She smiled, patting his sleeve. “You had enough of being bossed around from Mama. So we want you to feel free as a bluejay. You can finally be happy and do as you please.”

Do as he pleased… Her voice faded in his mind and became Addie’s voice. They had been courting for a few weeks that fall-mostly just walking in the woods while he called himself hunting. He had done most of the talking-about his knack for machinery, and his plans to make something of himself. She had walked along beside him in silence, sometimes nodding at what he said. She was small, with a broad bony face under a cloud of black hair, and though she never said anything about how she felt, her blue eyes shone when she looked at him. When they were alone. Never at any other time.

“I’ve got to get down outta these hills,” he told her that day. “Makin’ a livin’s easier in town. I can get a job with the railroad, workin’ in the machine shop. But I got to live in town to do it.”

“You do as you please,” said Addie McCrory.

“But…” He hesitated with the weight of the asking. “I want you to come with me.”

He didn’t say any more, and she didn’t either. No Solitary McCrory had ever been fool enough to leave the hills. They weren’t used to town ways, and they couldn’t change any more than a chicken hawk could. Kept to themselves and didn’t make friends. “Ain’t nothing we want bad enough to go to town for,” the McCrorys used to say. He had almost realized even back then what it would be like for her to be set down among people who never would understand. A house in town and all those strangers: it was like asking anybody else to live in a cage, but he had asked because he wanted her with him. He would have gone anyway, but he wanted her with him.

She looked at him for a long time before she finally said: “I’ll come.”

He reckoned she liked him then, but he hadn’t really understood until after she was his, and he learned that McCrory feelings were like a fire in a woodstove: the flames were hid behind iron walls, but inside they burned brighter and longer than any open fire. She had gone with him, and never once in all those years that followed had she mentioned it, or asked to go back. If she had, he would have gone with her.

“Dad?” said Frances Lee a little louder. “What would you like to do?”

“I don’t reckon it matters,” said Wesley.

THE ROAD WAS even narrower than he remembered. It lurched and bucked through the granite spines of the Unaka Mountains, cutting through tilting pastures and scrub forest like the dusty tongue of a coon dog lapping the Nolichucky River a few miles farther on. They weren’t going that far, though. The trail to the old homeplace should lie past a few more bends in the road. There would be a mark on an outcrop of limestone, his cousin Whilden had told him, and a little turnoff where he could park the four-wheel drive. They would have to walk the rest of the way.

“Course you can’t drive up there,” Whilden had warned him. “It’s purt near straight up. We couldn’t hardly get a mule up there to clear timber.”