Foggy Mountain Breakdown

Foggy Mountain Breakdown Sharyn McCrumb That afternoon the Haskell girls came by collecting money for a funeral wreath. Davy gave them a nickel and ten pennies from the baking powder can in the pantry. Mama would probably have given them a quarter, since Dad was working a couple ofdays a week at the railroad shop now, but she was visiting over at the Kesslers, talking about the accident. All the mothers in the community would be talking about the tragedy, with their eyes red from crying, because, as the preacher said, death is always a pang of sorrow no matter who is taken, but sooner or later, every one of them would say, "It mighthave beenmy boy." Itwasn't one oftheirboys, though; it was Junior Mullins. Fifteen cents was enough for Junior Mullins, Davy thought. The money collected from the twenty-three families living back in the hollow ofFoggy Mountain would be enough for a decent bunch ofstorebought flowers from the shop in Erwin. One of the Haskell girls would write everyfamily's name on the card to be given to Junior's parents. There would probably be bigger, fancier wreaths from Mr. Mullins's fellow managers at the railroad, maybe even one from the president of the railroad himself, considering the circumstances, but the neighbors would want to send one anyway, to show that their thoughts and prayers were with the family in this time ofsorrow. Davywas still in mourning for his bicycle. Nobody was collecting flowers for it. Two dollars it had cost. Two dollars earned in solitary misery with sweat and brier-pricks, picking blackberries in the abandoned fields, and selling them door to door at ten cents a gallon. It takes a lot ofblackberries to make a gallon. Getting two dollars' worth of dimes had cost Davy two precious weeks ofsummer—two weeks ofworking most ofthe Sharyn McCrumb, Blachburg, Virginia, is a best-selling author whose critically -acclaimedsuccess in Southernfiction has been scholarly aswellas popular . Her mostrecentwork is Foggy Mountain Breakdown, a collection ofher short stories, published in September 1997 by Ballantine Books, and the forthcoming novel The Ballad ofFrankie Silver will bepublished by Dutton in May 1998. 55 day dragging a gallon bucket through the briers, sidestepping snakes and poison oak, while everybody else went swimming or played ball at the old gravel pit. Two weeks without candy, soda pop, or Saturday matinees. Saturday afternoons were the hardest. Davy would be alone in a field of brambles, so hot that the air was wavy when you looked into the distance, widi the mountains shutting him in like the green walls of an open air prison. Somewhere on the other side ofthat ridge, his friends were having fun. Hour after hour he stooped over blackberry thickets, and to keep his mind off his sore back and stuck fingers, he'd try to imagine what was playing at the picture show. The cowboys, like Buck Jones or Tom Mix and his horse Tony, were his favorite, but he went every Saturday he could afford, no matter what was playing. When you're eleven years old and home seems duller than ditch water, anything on the screen is better than real life. You had to want something real bad to miss the movies on account ofit. Right now the movie house was showing Hills ofPeril : Buck Jones helps a young woman save her gold mine from outlaws. The pictures were silent, but the words were printed at the bottom of the screen. He reckoned most ofthe boys in the county had learned more about reading at the picture show than they had in the school house. At Saturday matinees , with all those boys reading the lines out loud as they flashed on the screen, the theater hummed with a steady drone that sounded like the Johnstons' beehives at swarm time. Davy'd missed most ofthe Phantom serial. He'd had to make do with a summary ofthe story from Johnny Suttle, who forgot bits ofthe story and kept repeating the parts he liked, but Davy didn't care. There'd be other movies, and his reward for missing this one was his very own bicycle. His hard-earned...