Foggy Mountain Breakdown and Other Stories by Sharyn McCrumb

settled it. She was going to be a mother. She couldn’t work. No wife of his was going to leave her kid and go to work. He didn’t seem very happy about the baby, though; he never wanted to talk about what to name it, or anything. He’d just say that she had to stay home and look after it.
    It wasn’t until she saw him shoot the hen today that she understood what he’d done and why. It was like the story about Solomon: when the king offered to cut the disputed baby in two, and the real mother was willing to give it up rather than see it killed. That poor old hen had been willing to do anything to save her baby. And Ramer had tried to make her give up her life, the chance to make something of herself, using their baby as a weapon. But Ramer was no Solomon; he would have cut the baby in two, just to make sure that everyone was equally unhappy.
    Ramer hadn’t even noticed her when she came in the shed. She had been crying, but they were silent tears. By the time she had walked from the kitchen out to the shed, she wasn’t angry anymore, just sorrowful that everythinghad turned out so wrong, and that Ramer had turned into somebody she had to escape from. The gun had been propped up against the wheelbarrow; he didn’t even turn around when she picked it up. He was intent on his butchering, and his hands were red to the wrists. Franchette walked around in front of him, balancing the gun around her swollen belly. He did look up then, just as she fired. She put the gun in his hands, and went back to the house to wash away the blood. The hen’s blood and Ramer’s were all mixed together on her hands.
    She spent the walk to Della’s house taking deep breaths, trying to feel calm again, and thinking how she should react when she got home that afternoon and discovered that Ramer had shot himself in the shed while cleaning his gun. Maybe she should be real upset, and then say that she couldn’t sit around the house all day dwelling on the tragedy, and that a job would take her mind off things.
    She stopped at Della’s mailbox to catch her breath. In the white tube labeled
Scout
was a rolled-up newspaper like the one she’d left behind on the breakfast table. Franchette eased it out and carried it up the walk to Della’s front door. On the way to town she was going to read the want ads.

THE WITNESS

    I T HAPPENED ON no particular day—not close enough to Christmas or his birthday for Sam to mark the time. It was warm, though, because he was playing outside, and there were white flowers on the tree in Aunt Till’s yard. Her cat Old Painter lay tucked in the hedge, keeping one yellow eye on the birds wobbling on the clothesline. He scarcely moved when Sam crept close to his hiding place and snapped a twig from the hedge. Sam was thinking about elephants.
    Dad ought to be home soon. Maybe he could get him to tell the story again. Sam walked to the ditch at the edge of the yard and looked down the gravel pike toward town. No one in sight; it was too early yet for Dad to have walked the three miles home from the machine shop. The ghost train had just rattled past on the tracks behind the house.
    When the family first rented the white frame house, the year Sam was three, it was supposed to be haunted. Pictures fell off the wall for no reason; dishes rattled on the shelf and sometimes fell. Something white had been seen at night moving behind the house. A few weeks after they moved in, their neighbor “Aunt” Till had been hanging out her washing and had called across the hedge to pass the time of day with Sam’s mother. The two womenmet at the privet hedge, and Aunt Till talked a mile a minute. Addie, who like all Solitary McCrorys lived in mortal fear of being talked at, stood twisting her apron until she came up with something to say. “What about them ghosts?”
    She started to recite the peculiar goings-on, but by the time she finished Aunt Till was smiling and shaking her head.
    “Shoot far,” she said. “When them