Foggy Mountain Breakdown and Other Stories Read online

  Foggy Mountain Breakdown and Other Stories

  Sharyn Mccrumb

  This collection of short fiction contains chilling tales of suspense and narratives that embrace southern Appalachian locales and themes: a mountain healer skirmishes with a serial killer; a reincarnated murder victim seeks revenge; and honeymooners in the groom's ancestral home are having second thoughts.

  Sharyn McCrumb

  Foggy Mountain Breakdown and Other Stories

  © 1997

  To Mary Frances Amick Hinte,

  wherever she is

  INTRODUCTION

  I COME FROM a race of storytellers.

  My father’s family-the Arrowoods and the McCourys-settled in the Smoky Mountains of western North Carolina in 1790, when the wilderness was still Indian country. They came from the north of England and from Scotland, and they seemed to want mountains, land, and as few neighbors as possible.

  The first of the McCourys to settle in America was my great-great-great-grandfather Malcolm McCoury, a Scot who was kidnapped as a child from the island of Islay in the Hebrides in 1750, and made to serve as a cabin boy on a sailing ship. He later became an attorney in Morristown, New Jersey; fought with the Morris Militia in the American Revolution; and finally settled in what is now Mitchell County, western North Carolina, in 1794. Yet another “connection” (a distant cousin) is the convicted murderess Frankie Silver (1813-1833), who was the first woman hanged for murder in the state of North Carolina.

  I grew up listening to my father’s tales of World War II in the Pacific, and to older family stories of duels and of escapades in Model T Fords. With such adventurers in my background, I grew up seeing the world as a wild and exciting place; the quiet tales of suburban angst so popular in modern fiction are Martian to me.

  Storytelling is an art form that I learned early on. When I was a little girl, my father would come in to tell me a bedtime story, which usually began with a phrase like “Once there was a prince named Paris, whose father was Priam, the king of Troy…” Thus I got The Iliad in nightly installments, geared to the level of a four-year-old’s understanding. I grew up in a swirl of tales: the classics retold; ballads or country songs, each having a melody, but above all a plot; and family stories about Civil War soldiers, train wrecks, and lost silver mines.

  My mother contributed stories of her grandfather, John Burdette Taylor, who had been a sixteen-year-old private in the 68th North Carolina Rangers (CSA). His regiment had walked in ragbound boots, following the railroad tracks, from Virginia to Fort Fisher, site of a decisive North Carolina battle. All his life he would remember leaving footprints of blood in the snow as he marched. When John Taylor returned home to Carteret County, southeastern North Carolina, at the end of the war, his mother, who was recovering from typhoid, got up out of her sickbed to attend the welcome home party for her son. She died that night.

  My father’s family fund of Civil War stories involved great-great-uncles in western North Carolina who had discovered a silver mine or a valley of ginseng while roaming the hills, trying to escape conscription into one marauding army or the other. There were the two sides of the South embodied in my parents’ oral histories: Mother’s family represented the flatland South, steeped in its magnolia myths, replete with Gorham sterling silver and Wedgwood china. My father’s kinfolks spoke for the Appalachian South, where the pioneer spirit took root. In their War between the States, the Cause was somebody else’s business, and the war was a deadly struggle between neighbors. I could not belong completely to either of these Souths because I am inextricably a part of both.

  This duality of my childhood, a sense of having a foot in two cultures, gave me that sense of otherness that one often finds in writers: the feeling of being an outsider, observing one’s surroundings, and looking even at personal events at one remove.

  So much conflict; so much drama; and two sides to everything. Stories, I learned, involved character, and drama, and they always centered around irrevocable events that mattered.

  This book is a collection of almost all the short stories I have ever written. Some of them are serious character studies (“A Predatory Woman,” “Among My Souvenirs,” “The Matchmaker”); some are sad stories set in the Southern mountains (“Precious Jewel,” “Telling the Bees,” “Old Rattler”); and some are whimsical tales of fantasy and humor (“An Autumn Migration,” “Remains to Be Seen,” “Nine Lives to Live”). The difference in styles reflects the duality in my nature: Mountain versus Southern, Daddy’s side versus Mother’s side. I like to think that both of them win.

  The earliest story in the collection, “Love on First Bounce,” is a semidocumentary of my adolescence in a small Southern town, and the first draft was written when I was in high school. It marks the first appearance of Elizabeth MacPherson, the heroine of many of my novels. I hear her voice, too, in the narrator of “Southern Comfort.” Compare the sunny life of that suburban child to the dark, spartan boyhood described in “Foggy Mountain Breakdown,” which is a portrait of my father’s youth in the Tennessee mountains.

  Sometimes when I write short stories I set myself a task. “Precious Jewel,” based on my father’s family, was an attempt to see if I could write a short story in which the most vivid character does not appear: Addie McCrory is dead when the narrative begins. “John Knox in Paradise” is the old Scots Border tale of Thomas the Rhymer, retold in modern terms, with True Thomas and his captor the Queen of Elfland recast as a modern Scot and a young American woman.

  The ideas came from many different places: from correspondence with a reader I’ve never met (“Gentle Reader”); from something I saw that triggered an idea (“Remains to Be Seen”-the mummy described in the story really was on display in an army surplus store in North Carolina years ago); from a newspaper article (“Not All Brides Are Beautiful,” my cynical reaction to the wedding of an inmate on Virginia’s death row).

  No matter where the ideas originate, though, they are all filtered through my own split perception, to be sorted into “Southern” or “Mountain.” If I had to pick out one common thread present in each of these vastly different stories, I would say that it is this: in every single story, there is someone who feels like a stranger.

  PRECIOUS JEWEL

  DYING COST NOTHING and could be done alone-otherwise, Addie Hemrick might have lived forever. As it was, she grudgingly loosed her spirit from its wizened body, saying no good-byes to the kinfolk duty-bound to her bedside, and leaving nothing to anyone except the obligation to bury her in sufficient style to satisfy the neighbors that the family had “done right by her.” Gone, but not forgotten. Legends of her temper and anti-sociability might outlast the marble slabs in the little mountain graveyard.

  She was a McCrory from up around Cade’s Cove; one of the Solitary McCrorys, as opposed to the Tinker McCrorys or the Preaching McCrorys. Her clan was known for living in little cabins as far up the mountain as they could get and staying put. They didn’t hold with church-going, and folks in the cove said that if a bee-tracker or a drummer headed for their cabin, they hid in the woods until he went away again. Not scared, the McCrorys weren’t. It was just in their blood to keep to themselves. A Solitary McCrory could no more make small talk than he could lay an egg.

  So it was one notch short of a miracle when Wesley Hemrick, the circuit preacher’s sixth boy, let it be known that he was marrying Miss Addie McCrory, of the Solitary McCrorys.

  She had spent a few months in the one-room school learning her letters. Probably the meeting took place there, and Wesley Hemrick may have hunted squirrel in her neck of the woods on purpose thereafter. However it came about, she accepted the proposa
l and became a sullen, gawky bride one Sunday after meeting. Strangers clabbered around her, and she blinked at them. No telling what they meant for her to do, so she stood patiently until they went away.

  A few days later they went down the mountain to catch the logging train, and no one saw them off. Wesley had got a job in the machine shop of the Clinchfield Railroad in town. They clattered down from the hills, standing in the engineer’s cabin, holding everything they owned in two paper sacks. That logging train would someday become Tweetsie, a children’s ride in a tourist park. Addie Hemrick’s grandchildren would ride squealing through tunnels on Tweetsie; she never went with them.

  They rented a little frame house close to the railroad, and set up housekeeping. Addie was a town-dweller now, but she kept to her old ways. Neighbors were nodded at across a privet hedge; she rarely spoke and never visited.

  Company did come to call, however, in the form of Wesley’s five brothers: M. L., Lewis, Francis, and the twins Tom and Harvey. In the evenings after work they’d appear in the backyard and slip into the smokehouse for their guitars and fiddles. They couldn’t keep them up home, because the Reverend John B. Hemrick claimed that stringed instruments were of the devil, and he wouldn’t have them on the place. He always contended that the upright piano in the parlor was a percussion instrument. So Wesley’s house became the gathering place for the pickers. They’d sit in kitchen chairs beside the smokehouse and sing “Barbry Ellen” and “A Fair Young Maid All in the Garden,” while the Mason jar was passed from one free hand to another.

  Addie never set foot in the yard when that was going on, but she watched from the kitchen window, feeling as trapped as if she were tied to a chair. One of them might come in for a glass of water or some such excuse, and he’d glance over her kitchen and the little parlor, and, whatever he saw, he’d be talking about it to those people back up the mountain. The house was always clean and neat, with just the two of them, but if they came in, they’d find something to say, and she couldn’t bear to be talked about. She imagined their voices in her mind, and it felt like being in a cage poked with sticks.

  She stood it for months-until that first baby was on its way, due in the winter-and then one August evening she charged out of the house with a broom, screaming for them to get off the place. “And take your liquor!” she’d shouted between sobs, “and don’t you’uns ever come back!”

  They hadn’t.

  In fifty years, they hadn’t. Other factors were in play, of course. Lewis, Tom, and M. L. all went north to Detroit to work in the factories; Francis got a farm near Spruce Pine; and influenza took Harvey in 1920, the year Sam was born.

  Sam was followed a year later by Frances Lee, and then came two stillborn babies-both boys-and then no more. The babies were always clean and seen-to, fed amply of whatever there was, but they stayed strangers. Addie peered into their wobbly infant eyes and decided no, she didn’t know them at all.

  Frances Lee married at sixteen and ran off to Chicago, away from her mother’s cold stare. Sam took a little longer, long enough to work his way through a semester of Teachers College, and then he let the army take him out of east Tennessee and into Normandy. That war and two others had come and gone, and the family was coming home.

  The old frame house was bulging with kinfolk, mostly Wesley’s side of the family. The women and their young’uns sat together in the tidy parlor, having put their bowls of beans and potato salad on the dining room table.

  “A-lord, I wish Addie could be here,” sighed Sally Hemrick, M. L.’s wife.

  The others nodded in mournful agreement.

  If she was, thought Frances Lee, you’d all be going out the window.

  Nobody had been allowed in that parlor. Even the sofa, of stiff green fabric laced with metallic threads, was deliberately uncomfortable. If anyone came to call, they sat on the back porch, if they got in at all.

  Frances Lee and her second husband, Wayne, had driven down from Brookfield after Aunt Sally phoned them the news. They had delayed just long enough to drop the boys off at his mother’s house, and for Frances Lee to get a Kitty Wells permanent at the Maison de Beaute. In a way, she felt good about going home. Wayne’s brassy Chrysler was the biggest car in the driveway, and thanks to the union, he was doing all right at the factory. They had a four-bedroom ranch house and a camper. Frances Lee thought she must be about the most successful person the family ever had.

  “Has anybody heard from Sam?” she asked.

  Aunt Sally nodded. “He’s flying down from Washington. Tom’s oldest boy went to pick him up.”

  “Well, I guess I’ll go see what the menfolk are doing,” said Frances Lee.

  She found them in lawn chairs in the backyard: Daddy Wesley, Uncle M. L., and Wayne. Lewis had his old Stella guitar, and he was picking out “Precious Jewel.”

  “May the angels have peace, God rest her in heaven; they’ve broken my heart and they’ve left me to roam.”

  Addie was lying alone in DeHart’s Funeral Home, as she would have wished.

  Major Sam Hemrick settled back in the front seat of Tommy Ray Hemrick’s pickup truck, and closed his mind to the blare of the local country station. Things hadn’t changed much in the county since he was a kid: same rambling farmhouses gently decaying into green hillsides. The road was better, of course. He remembered when Model A’s skirted the ruts in the deep, red clay, and the fifteen miles to the city had been an all-day excursion. He glanced at his watch, the silver Omega he’d picked up in Germany. His plane had landed at three, and they’d probably be at the house by four-fifteen.

  “Who was there when you left?” he asked his cousin.

  “A passel,” said Tommy Ray. “Dad, Uncle Lewis, M. L. and Aunt Sally and their young’uns. Frances Lee and Wayne got in last night. They’re staying at Mrs. Lane’s Boarding House, though. They figured it was easier than driving in from one of the farms every day. Don’t know how long they’ll be staying, though.”

  Not long, thought Sam. Frances Lee could get bored with the homeplace mighty quick. She always did. But she still came back, from time to time: maybe the dutiful daughter, maybe just to show off.

  Not like him…

  It had been more than twenty years since he’d left home, and even after the anger had burned itself out, he hadn’t gone back. Not even to see Dad.

  Sam missed him sometimes, though. In the autumn he’d get to thinking about hunting with Wesley and Uncle Francis in the hills above Cade’s Cove. He’d sit in camp surrounded by leaves that always stayed green, and remember the bands of red and gold ridges against a cloudless blue sky back home. And he’d be cleaning an M-16 instead of the Winchester 30-06 he used to have.

  He still remembered the smooth feel of the walnut stock of that rifle, and the carving above the trigger that he kept shining with alcohol. It had been a custom job, and the seventy-two dollars it had cost might as well have been seven hundred in 1940. It took him nearly a year of working every job he could talk anybody into giving him, but he finally saved up enough to buy it. With a jarful of change from picking blueberries at ten cents an hour, the five-dollar gold piece he’d got for winning the spelling bee, and a stack of dollar bills from a month of Saturdays at the sawmill, he paid the seventy-two dollars plus tax (donated by Wesley), and bought the gun. Oh, but it was worth it! He used to brag that he could take the wings off a fly on top of the smokehouse, and he almost believed it.

  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 hi
lls 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.