Black Mountain Breakdown Read Online Free

and wrinkled coming through the tubes, but Lorene thought when she first saw her that she had never, never seen a more beautiful child. Lorene named her the prettiest name she could think of, Crystal Renée. Lorene thinks of the little dresses she usedto dress Crystal in, and the little white shoes with straps. Crystal will grow up to be somebody; Lorene will see to that. Crystal will go to a fine school on that rivet money. She will marry a doctor. But whatever she does, she will be somebody special, because Lorene is raising her that way. Of course Grant has a bad influence on Crystal, but Lorene ignores it, as she ignores everything she can’t change. Lorene deals with her problems by rising above them. Now she stares at the closed door and drums her rosy nails for a minute on the tabletop. Then she switches the channels to see what else might be on TV.
    Behind the door is another room, another world almost. Here where Grant stays, even the air seems denser and different somehow. It smells like old smoke, like liquor, like Grant himself, yet the combination is not unpleasant really and Crystal loves it. The room is shadowy now, the only light coming from a floor lamp in the corner by the armchair, but even this light must have been too bright and so a blue shirt, or a piece of a shirt, has been thrown carelessly over the shade. This creates an irregular spread of light and a jagged shadow in the far corner of the room. Clearly this was Lorene’s best room once, her parlor. There is a gold sunburst clock above the mantel, no longer running. The artificial logs in the fireplace have fallen off their wrought-iron stand. The furniture is mostly a French Provincial living-room set, with shiny off-white brocaded upholstery: a sofa and three matching chairs. Now the brocade is dirty and some stuffing sticks out from the arm of the chair by the door. A squatty coffee table sprawls at a rakish angle before the sofa, only its gold claw feetprotruding from the papers and books jumbled high on its top and spilling over onto the floor. Other books are stacked about the room, and there are piles of clothing in the corners. The fancy gold drapes hang limp and open, but the Venetian blinds behind them are shut tight, a flat gray dusty expanse on the wall by the locked front door.
    Grant is reading poetry to the girls. He half sits, half lies in the armchair so that the light falls on his thin dog-eared book,
One Hundred and One Famous Poems.
Crystal sits close to him on the floor, holding on to his knee under the old blue silk robe he always wears. She is careful not to knock over the glass on the floor by his chair. Agnes is stretched out full length facing them with her chin on her fists, her plump bottom sticking straight up.
    “‘Abou Ben Adhem (may his tribe increase!)
    Awoke one night from a deep dream of peace…’”
    Grant begins, his voice gaining strength as he goes on, until it is as rich and full again as it used to be back when people said he ought to make a preacher—how he laughed at them—or a courtroom lawyer at least.
    “‘And saw within the moonlight in the room,
    Making it rich and like a lily in bloom,
    An angel writing in a book of gold…’”
    Now Grant is into it fully, the cadenced rhythms, the rise and dip and fall of the lines, and his voice drops nearly to a whisper and then comes out strong and loud and resonantas he gestures grandly with the book and waves it in the air, going mostly from memory and rising to his fullest power on
“Lo!
Ben Adhem’s name led all the rest!” The final word of the poem echoes in the room and the giant shadow of the book and Grant’s arm on the opposite wall disappears as his arm drops back to his lap and he sinks again, spent, into the battered chair. Grant laughs to break the silence.
    “Oh, I love that one,” Crystal says. Her face is turned up to her father and she is smiling. He reaches down to touch her hair.
    “How do you like that one, Agnes?” Grant