Sharyn McCrumb - Foggy Mountain Breakdown and Other Stories

“No!” She was wailing again. “I just wanted to see him. I didn’t want him to see me.”

I told Carol Lee that if that was her idea of a romantic encounter, she would be much better off falling in love with a Paul McCartney poster, but she was not amused. Well, I thought, at least I’ve heard the last of Cholly Barnes.

I hadn’t, though.

Carol Lee continued to stake out a lunch table so that she could keep Cholly under surveillance while we ate, and her obsession with him showed no sign of letting up. She managed to discover his birthday, his dog’s name, his food preferences, and about a zillion other completely useless biographical details, all of which she regaled me with as we watched him eat. If Taylor High had offered a course in Cholly Barnes, we would have passed it with honors.

Phase Two of Carol Lee’s Doomed Romance began early in May. One afternoon she set down her lunch tray with an expression of tragic suffering on her face. I thought it was the meat loaf that had prompted this air of gloom, but as she sat down, she said, “Oh, Elizabeth, it’s May .”

I looked doubtfully at the meat loaf. “Yes,” I said. “I don’t mind May, myself.”

“But school will be over in a few weeks.”

“Yes. That prospect doesn’t distress me, either. I’ll be out of Mrs. Baxter’s geometry class forever.”

“But he’s graduating !”

“Oh.”

“I can’t live without him.”

It was useless to point out that she wasn’t even remotely living with him. “You’ll get over it,” I said, as consolingly as I could manage.

“I’ve lost him. We had so little time together.”

None, actually , I thought.

“I’ll never forget him, though,” said Carol Lee. “I’ll probably go off and tend lepers in the African veldt, or run a small lending library somewhere, and I’ll grow old and gray, with only my memories of him to sustain me. But I shall suffer in silence. I shall never speak his name again.”

I began counting the hours until graduation.

A week later the euphoric phase of the obsession returned. Carol Lee came down the steps after school, squealing in ecstasy. “Guess what I’ve got!” she said, in tones suggesting possession of the Hope diamond or an Irish sweepstakes ticket.

“Offhand I’d say schizophrenia,” I replied.

“No. Look!” She reached in her pocket and took out a small white square of cardboard. “His calling card!” she said, handing it over for inspection.

I took the slightly creased and grubby Jeremy Collins Barnes card, studying the engraved italic script with polite disinterest. “Very nice,” I said. “Where did you get it?” I pictured Carol Lee throwing him down on the floor of the hall and searching his pockets.

“One of the senior girls got it for me,” said Carol Lee. “Look on the back! He wrote on it.”

I turned the card over. There in tiny, script letters, Cholly Barnes had written: I shall pass through this world but once. If there be any good that I can do, or any kindness I can show, let me do it. Let me not defer it or neglect it, for I shall not pass this way again .

I didn’t think he would pass at all.

But he did. He passed, and he passed us in his white cap and gown as the seniors marched in two rows down the concrete steps of the stadium on graduation night. It is hard to bounce to the beat of “Pomp and Circumstance,” but Cholly Barnes managed to do it. I watched the white tassel bob its way down the steps of the bleachers and onto the field with the rest of the senior class, waiting for commencement exercises to begin. Carol Lee sat beside me in the bleachers, shredding a damp tissue and murmuring, “He’s leaving. He’s actually leaving.”

“We all have to go sometime,” I muttered.

“But he’s going away, and I’ll never see him again.”

“You never see him now,” I pointed out. “Except when you have him under surveillance, I mean. Maybe you could take some snapshots of him, and have them made into a poster. It would be about the same, you know.”

“He’s really leaving,” her voice trembled with misery. “He is going out of my life.”

“You look like a basset hound!” I hissed at her. “People are staring at you. Snap out of it!”

“I’ll never forget him,” said Carol Lee in her most mournful tones. “I’ll treasure the memory of him forever.”

Ah! I thought, the Nobility Phase of the Grand Passion has kicked in .

“I’ll treasure these memories of him, and someday when I am old and gray… when I’m thirty-five… I’ll tell my children about my first real love.”

“If your memory isn’t gone by then. Advanced senility.”

Carol Lee gave me a reproachful look through her tears, and I decided to save my breath. We watched the rest of the graduation ceremony in silence, punctuated by an occasional sniffle from the Bereaved One.

At last it was over. The diplomas were handed out, the mortarboards were thrown into the air, as the seniors had been carefully instructed not to do, and the spectators filed onto the field to mingle with the newly certified high school graduates. As we left the bleachers, Carol Lee trailed behind me in silent misery.

After a few moments’ reconnaissance, I spotted Cholly Barnes, diploma in hand, chatting with three of his classmates.

“Why don’t you go over and congratulate him?” I said. “He’s standing right over there with some of the other seniors.”

“Oh, I couldn’t!” whispered Carol Lee.

“Sure you could. It’s a public celebration. Just go over and say, ‘Congratulations. Best of luck in the future.’ ”

She looked stricken. “No, I couldn’t,” she said. “I don’t know him!”

We stood there for a few more minutes watching flashbulbs pop in the twilight, and then we turned and watched the white figure, gown flapping, bounce off into the warm June night.

I LOANED HER eight guidebooks of Scotland, and all the maps that I had, but she only looked at the castles, and the pictures of mountains against the sky. “Not like my mountains,” she said. “There aren’t any trees, but it’s close enough. I guess they must have felt at home.”

Her people, she meant: the McCourys. Sometime a few centuries back, to hear her tell it, they left Scotland for the New World, and walked the mountain passes from Pennsylvania to settle in the hollows of east Tennessee. She knows more history than I do, but she takes it all personally. Her eyes flash when she talks about the Jacobite cause, but she mispronounces most of the battles-Cul- low -den, she says. I tell her how to say them correctly, but I can’t tell her much about them. It was a long time ago, and nobody minds anymore.

She tells me I don’t look Scottish, whatever that means. Lots of people have brown eyes and brown hair. What would she know about it? She had never been in Scotland. “I’m a Celt,” she says, the way someone else might say, “I’m a duchess,” though I think it’s nothing much to be proud of, the way they’re carrying on in Belfast. She has the look of them, though, with that mass of black hair and the clear blue eyes of a bomb-throwing Irish saint. She looks at me sometimes, and she knows things I’d never dream of telling her.

She seems to expect me to know some kind of secret, but she’ll never say what it is. Fash’t , she’ll say. “Do you have that word?” Or clabbered , or red the room . Sometimes I’ve heard them, from my grandmother, perhaps, and she’ll smile as if I’d given her something, and say, “From mine, too.”