Foggy Mountain Breakdown and Other Stories

TELLING THE BEES

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.”

That was fine with Carl. He would welcome the isolation, but he’d had a hard time convincing Whilden of that. “A-lord, Carl-Stuart,” his cousin kept saying. “You don’t want to spend your honeymoon in that old place. Why, there ain’t no lights nor running water.” He had even offered the newly weds his own room, reckoning he could bunk on the sofa if they were so dead set on coming for their honeymoon. Carl smiled a little, remembering their phone conversation. Whilden didn’t come right out and say it, but it was plain enough that he thought that if he were a big-time engineer in San Francisco, he’d find a better place to take his bride than Cabe’s Hollow, Tennessee. Carl wondered what Whilden would consider a suitable location for a honeymoon: Bermuda, Atlanta… or Myrtle Beach, South Carolina? Elissa had talked about going to Mexico, but he told her that he wanted her to see where he’d grown up. The folks were dead, of course-except for a passel of cousins-but the land had hardly changed at all. He smiled at a couple of white-faced calves poking their noses through a fence: except for a score of years, they might be Bushes and Curly, the pair he had lovingly raised as a 4-H project.

Why had he been so insistent on coming back here? He hadn’t been back to Tennessee in years. Perhaps it was some sort of familial instinct-this urge to bring his bride back to the family seat, as if the ghosts would look on her and approve. Anyway, he had wanted Elissa to see the hills. Maybe then she would understand why California’s mountains just weren’t the same. His homesickness for the mountains was unassuaged by jaunts to Lake Tahoe. The silver-capped Rockies stretching out like a Sierra Club calendar left him unmoved, while these stubby weathered hills, silver with winter birches, made his heart tighten. Damn near twenty years, and he still thought of it as home.

“So these are your precious Appalachians.” Elissa smiled, nodding at a not-too-distant skyline. “They don’t seem like mountains.”

“I know.” He had thought about that when he realized that the Rockies were different from his mountains. The Appalachians don’t stand back and pose for you, he finally decided. They come up close and hold you, so they don’t seem so big and imposing. Cabe’s Hollow must be about three thousand feet above sea level, but you didn’t feel it, because you were in the mountains. Among them.

“This is Cabe’s Mill Road,” he told her. He remembered the gristmill at the end of it, down by the river. It was probably abandoned now. He’d heard that Old Man Cabe had died, and he didn’t suppose that Garrett would have stayed around to run it. Garrett always was a hell-raiser. Used to chase girls through the fields waving a black snake like a bullwhip. Maybe they’d go down and take a look at the mill sometime. Past a steep bend in the road, he saw the flash of an X mark in yellow rock. “Here’s the turnoff to the cabin.”

Elissa straightened up and looked out the window. “Good. I’m stiff from riding. First the airplane, and then all these archaic little roads. What cabin? I don’t see any cabin.”

Carl grinned. “Now, Mrs. Spurlock, you’re talking like a city girl.”

She made a face at him. “Give me time. I’ve only been married to a hillbilly for six hours. But where is the cabin? I don’t see it! Is it behind those trees?” She pulled out her compact and began arranging her hair and dabbing at her nose.

“You see that mountain there?” he said. “Well, the cabin is at the end of a little path that goes straight up it.”

Elissa lowered her compact slowly. “Is this the surprise you promised me, Carl?”

He flushed a little. “Elissa, I just had to get you to see it. This land has been in my family for a hundred and fifty years. My great-grandfather built this old cabin. It’s important to me. Please?”

She straightened her alpaca ski hat and smoothed her bangs. “You want me to walk all the way to the top of a mountain to look at a cabin?”

“No. That’s where we’re going to stay. Remember? I told you I’d called my cousin Whilden, who owns this land now, and he-”

She smiled carefully. “Is that what you meant by a cabin? It’s not a ski lodge or anything like that?”

“Just a cabin. Remember how you said you’d go camping with me sometime?”

“But, Carl, it’s December!” said Elissa, still smiling.

“There’s a fireplace.” He looked up at the mountain, darkening against a red sky. The trees were no longer distinct. “We’d better get started. The light’s going.”

He pulled down the back tailgate and hauled out his canvas valise, while Elissa stood at his elbow, making little clouds with her breath. “It’s getting late, so I’m only going to make one trip tonight. Which one of these do you need?” He pointed to the three pieces of matching pink luggage.

“All of them, I guess,” said Elissa in a puzzled voice. “I don’t remember what I packed where.”

Carl rubbed his chin and considered the problem as if he were at work, plotting out the weight distribution in a B-1B. Finally he said: “I’ll carry my bag and that big suitcase of yours. If you need anything else, you’ll have to carry it.”

He hoisted her suitcase out of the truck. After a moment’s hesitation, she picked up the makeup case and nodded for him to close the hatch.

“Don’t forget to lock it, Carl!”

He smiled. “This isn’t Aspen, Elissa. The only people on this road are the Pattons and the Shulls-and they wouldn’t take sugar packets from a diner, much less rob a truck!”

“Things might have changed in fifteen years, Carl!”

He looked around him. Things might have changed-but that hadn’t. Cabe’s Mountain stood just as bare and wild on this December evening as it had years ago when he’d hunted squirrel with Garrett up this very path. Only he had changed: the engineer with a Ph.D. from Stanford and an aerie of chrome and glass overlooking the Bay. He had come a long way from Cabe’s Hollow. “Come on, Elissa! We’re burning daylight!”

They were following an old logging trail which led to the foot of the mountain. She clumped along beside him in her slim leather boots, crackling leaves with every step. Just as well they weren’t hunting squirrels; she was making enough noise to wake up the bears.

“Are we almost there, Carl?” panted Elissa, after a few moments’ silence.

Carl turned to look at her. He could still see the truck parked by the road. “We haven’t started yet.” He smiled reassuringly. Elissa was so beautiful in her embroidered white ski parka, her cheeks pink with cold. She looked expensive and-his mind fumbled for the word-classy. Like one of those evening gown models in the old Sears Wishbook. She did him proud.

He came to the edge of a branch of swift-running spring water. It was clear, about ankle-deep, and four feet across.

“Where’s the bridge?” asked Elissa at his elbow.

“See that cinder block in the middle? You step on to that and then over to the other side.”

“But the cinder block is under water, Carl!”

“About an inch.”

In the end he had to take the suitcase across, and then come back and carry her over the stream. She was afraid she would fall, and she kept saying that she couldn’t get her new boots wet. She held out one small foot, pointing to the shining leather boot with its dainty two-inch heel. Carl frowned. “I told you to wear walking shoes, Elissa. How are you going to climb in those things?”

Her face fell. “Don’t you like them? They cost a hundred and eighty-five dollars.”

He sighed. “Just watch where you’re walking. It’s rained here in the last day or two, and the ground is apt to be slippery.”

“I’ll be fine, darling. I jog, don’t I?”

The path up the mountain to the cabin was not so much a trail as an absence of underbrush in a wavy line weaving its way upward. Fallen trees obstructed the way, and outgrowths from nearby bramble bushes slowed them down. Carl went first, stopping to untangle Elissa from the briars or to lift her over a tree trunk. She had not spoken since they began the climb; he could hear her breath coming in labored gasps. Every twenty feet or so they stopped to rest, until her breathing was normal again, before resuming their climb.

“Jogging on flat land is a lot different from mountain climbing,” he said gently. “You just tell me when you want to rest again.”

“No. No. I’m fine, but this boot heel is coming loose.” She took a deep breath. “You don’t think I’m going to let a man twelve years older than I am beat me up a mountain, do you?”

Carl smiled. “You’re doing fine.” He slowed his step a little and began to talk, to take her mind off the climbing. “You know, that branch back there put me in mind of my uncle Mose. He used to come here bee-tracking in the summertime. Of course, bees need water in the hot summer to make honey and to cool the hive, so they fly to the nearest stream to get it. Well, my old uncle Mose would locate a bee watering place, and he’d sit down nearby, and just watch those bees leave with a stomachful of water. He’d follow their flight with just his eyes for as far as he could see them. Past that sumac bush or that service tree. After a while he’d move to that tree and sit and watch several more bees go by, and note the next place he lost sight of them. After a couple of short hops like that, he’d finally get to the hollow tree they were headed for. He’d mark the tree so he could find it again, and go on home.”

He glanced back at Elissa. She seemed to be concentrating on the path. Her face glowed from exertion, and she pushed at her wet bangs with the wrist of one glove. Impulsively, he took the makeup case from her and tucked it under his arm. She did not look up.

“Course now, the reason Uncle Mose would mark that tree would be so that he could find it again come fall,” Carl went on. “Long about late October, he’d come back down the mountain with a zinc washtub, ax, rope, and a little box, and he’d set to work. He’d split that hollow tree open, catch the queen in a box, scoop all the honey out into the washtub, and carry it home. The bees would usually swarm on a branch, so he’d cut down the branch and take it home, where he’d built some hives in the back garden. Then he’d let the queen bee out of the box, and put the branch down beside the homemade hive, which had some of the honey put in it for the bees to winter on. The rest of the honey went into pint jars for the family. It took patience, but the results were worth it.” He turned to look at her.

Elissa regarded him steadily. “I loathe bees.”

They stood on the mountaintop, a narrow ridge of sturdy pines, and looked down at the little meadow cupped in a hollow below the summit. The land had been cleared and cultivated years before, and the little cabin, which sat in a puddle of sunlight at the edge of the garden furrows, seemed sturdy for its age. Brown winter grass stretched away to the forest which encircled it, and aluminum pie tins, strung from branches to keep the birds from the garden, twirled soundlessly in the wind. The stillness was so absolute that it might have been a sepia photograph from Carl’s family album, or a dream in which time elapses in slow motion. Carl tried to remember times he had been at the cabin, when the old folks still lived there, as though calling them to memory might make them come alive in the barren landscape. The rotting wooden boxes near the woods would be painted white and set upright. Uncle Mose would be moving among them in his coveralls and veil, bees hovering at his side. Grandfather would be sitting on the porch steps, soaping the sidesaddle Grandmother used when they rode to church. Without wanting to, Carl turned and looked at the gray headstones beneath the cedar trees.

“Carl! I’m freezing! Are you going to stand up here all day?”

He looked at her for a moment before he realized what she had said. Then he nodded and helped her down the embankment toward the meadow.

Elissa wrinkled her nose at the sight of the cabin. “I don’t suppose there’s any heat,” she said flatly.

“Just a fireplace. Whilden left us some wood.” He had known where to look for it-stacked in a pile by the kindling stump.

As they walked through the garden plot, Elissa stopped to look at a child’s plastic rocking horse, set up as a yard ornament under a leafless dogwood.

“How tacky!” she sighed.

He helped her up the flat rock steps to the porch, and set the suitcases down by Granddad’s whittling bench. “Do you want me to carry you over the threshold?” he asked Elissa as he pushed open the door.

She peered into the darkness and shuddered. “Are there snakes in there?”

“No. If you’ll wait out here, I’ll light the oil lamp so you can see.”

“Oh, all right. Just hurry up!”

He could hear her pacing outside as he fumbled with the chimney of the oil lamp Whilden had left on the table. Finally he succeeded in putting the match to the lamp wick, and the small room glowed in lamplight. He saw that it had been freshly swept-although the window was still streaked with dirt-and a brace of logs had been carefully arranged in the fireplace. A clean quilt in a churn-dasher pattern covered the few shreds of upholstery left on the old sofa. On the table near the woodstove, Whilden had left a jar of coffee, a box of cornflakes, some evaporated milk, and-for decoration-red-berried pyracantha branches in a Mason jar.

“You’d think somebody would have cleaned this place up,” snapped Elissa in the doorway. She turned her head slowly to study the room, her eyebrows raised.

Carl brought in the suitcases from the front porch. “The bedroom is in there,” he said, leading the way. “I can heat you some well water on the stove if you’d like to wash. First, though, I’m going to get this fire going in the fireplace.”

Elissa sat down on the couch to watch. Carl knelt on the stone hearth, rearranging some of the smaller sticks. “See if you can find some newspapers,” he told her.

“Newspapers?”

“Yes. Or leaves. Anything I can use to get this fire started.”

Elissa began to wander around, looking behind the couch and poking in drawers in the kitchen part of the room. “How about this old calendar on the wall?” she called.

Carl turned to look at the wall decoration: a 1945 calendar with a drawing of a Hying Fortress against an unfurled flag. “No,” he said. “Not that.”

With a sigh of exasperation, Elissa continued to search. “Well, it certainly wasn’t one of your ancestors who discovered fire, Carl! Why don’t you just strike a match and let the logs burn?”

He put a match to one of the smaller sticks, holding it there until it burned his finger, but although the stick glowed tentatively for a few moments, it faded to darkness again. He reached in his pocket for another box of matches.

“Carl, I found some little pieces of cloth. Will they do?”

Elissa held up four short strips of black crêpe. “Are these from a quilt?” she asked.

“Bring them here.” He took them from her outstretched hand. “I haven’t seen these since Grandma died. They’re crêpe for the beehives.”

“The beehives?”

“Yes. For mourning. You have to tell the bees when there has been a death in the family, or else they’ll leave the hive and start one somewhere else. When Grandma died, Uncle Mose hung these black streamers on each beehive when he told the bees.”

“You’re teasing me!” Elissa protested.

“No. When somebody’s gone, you have to tell the bees they’re not coming back.”

Elissa shook her head. “There are some strange goings-on in your mountains,” she said.

Carl tucked one of the streamers away in the pocket of his jeans. He looked at her for a moment. “Well,” he said at last, “I guess I’d better start this fire.”

She answered the tone, rather than the words. “Carl! Are you angry with me?”

“Guess I’ll go out and gather up some leaves for kindling.” He started to get up.

“Carl! Please don’t go yet!” There was a catch in her voice, and she began to pace, not looking at him as she spoke. “I understand about your wanting me to see where you grew up and all, but I’m not used to this! I just didn’t know what to expect! I mean, you said cabin, but this isn’t like the cabins I’ve stayed in on ski trips! Carl, this is our honeymoon! I had to tell people we were going to Aspen, because how could I possibly explain that you wanted to come and stay in-this?”

He held another match to the sticks, concentrating on the feeble light in his hand.

“You dragged me up here and ruined my new boots-and for what? A shack with no water, no lights, and no heat!” She sat down on the arm of the sofa and sobbed. “I married an engineer, not a-a hillbilly!”

Carl watched the spark in the fireplace until it flickered out. “It’s all right, Elissa. We’ll leave in the morning. We’ll go wherever you want.”

She managed a moist smile. “Aspen?” she quavered.

“Sure. Aspen. Fine.”

“Oh, thank you, Carl! Things will be all right when we get back where we belong. You’ll see!”

He brushed off the legs of his pants. “I’ll go out and get those leaves now.”

“Do you want me to come along?”

“No. I won’t be long.”

He stood on the porch and looked at the quarter moon webbed in branches on the ridge until his eyes became accustomed to the dark. When the black shapes in the yard had rearranged themselves into familiar objects-a tree, a wagon wheel-he began to walk toward the back garden at the edge of the woods. Tomorrow he would stop at the farm and tell Whilden they were going. Maybe he’d send him something from California. Elissa would be all right when they got back. He pictured her at their glass-topped table pouring wine into Waterford goblets. She would be blond and tanned from a day of sailing, and she would tease him when he alternated Vivaldi and Ernest Tubb on the stereo. Elissa didn’t belong here, but… He tried to picture Roseanne Shull entertaining his engineer friends in the glass room over the Bay. It was time to go back.

He had reached the end of the garden. Glancing back at the cabin, Carl tried to remember how long he had been walking. Elissa would be impatient. It was time to gather the leaves and go back to her. He looked down at the abandoned beehive at his feet, the last of Uncle Mose’s collection. He had to go back. Pulling the black streamer from his pocket, he laid it gently on the box, and hurried away.