Breakheart Hill Read online

  The other men were older, with thinning hair and drooping bellies, and I have often thought that as Lyle sat among them that day, he must have seen them as grim images of his own destiny, men who had come to little, as he would come to little, though unlike them, he had had a moment of supreme possibility.

  Though I had few details, I knew that Lyle had very nearly clawed his way out of the smoldering redneck world he’d been born into, and that he’d thrown that golden chance away in a sudden act of violence.

  But that afternoon, Lyle Gates didn’t look violent at all as he sat calmly with the other road workers, talking quietly and sipping at the paper cup he held in his hand. He had a pack of Chesterfield cigarettes rolled up in his shirtsleeve, and a red baseball cap cocked playfully to the right, and from the ease and casualness of his manner it would have been hard to imagine that anything dark lurked in him, a personal history that had stripped him to the bone.

  And yet it was precisely that history that separated Lyle from the other men. It was a violent history, raw and edgy and impulsive, and as a result of it, various court orders had separated him from his young wife and infant daughter, so that he now lived with his aging mother in a part of Choctaw that was perilously close to Douglas, the Negro section, a part of town that even the most respectable white people often referred to as “Niggertown,” using the word as casually as New Yorkers might speak of Little Italy or San Franciscans of Chinatown.

  Lyle had been a senior at Choctaw High when Luke and I were still in junior high school, but we had heard a great deal about him nonetheless. For a brief, shining moment, Lyle had been famous in Choctaw, a star football quarterback who had very nearly taken his team to the state finals. As a player, he’d been smart and aggressive, and there’d been much talk of the various college football scholarships that were certain to be offered to him. But all of that had been abruptly swept away one night in November when Lyle had jumped another player from behind, slammed him to the ground and knocked him unconscious before his fellow teammates had been able to pull him off. After that, he’d been cut from the team and suspended from school, which he quit entirely several weeks later. It was even rumored that he might have gone to jail had the other player decided to press charges against him.

  After that, there’d been trouble with his wife, calls to the police, overnight incarcerations. Once he’d tried to kidnap his daughter, and in the process threatened his wife with a shotgun. The police had arrived again, and this time Lyle had spent a week in the county jail.

  But for all the tales of violence that surrounded him, Lyle Gates did not look particularly sinister at Cuffy’s that afternoon. Ringed by smoke from his cigarette, his clothes covered in a chalky orange dust, he looked rather like a human husk, something cast aside. Even his hairstyle, slicked back in a blond ducktail, located him at the fringes of a fading era, an artifact at twenty-three.

  He didn’t see Luke and me until he got up and headed for the door. Then he hung back slightly, let the other, older men leave the diner and sauntered over to us.

  “How ya’ll doing?” he asked.

  “Just fine, I guess,” Luke answered a little tensely, aware as he was of Lyle’s reputation.

  Lyle grinned, though something in his eyes remained distant and perhaps even a bit unsure as to whether he should have spoken to us at all. “Gettin’ any?”

  Luke shrugged but didn’t answer.

  Lyle’s eyes shifted over to me. “You look familiar,” he said.

  “Ben Wade,” I told him.

  He looked at me a moment, as if trying to think of something else to say. “You ever try the Frito Pie?” he asked finally.

  “No.”

  “You ought to,” Lyle said. “It’s Cuffy’s special.” His eyes moved from mine to Luke’s, then back to mine. “Ya’ll were still in junior high when I played ball for Choctaw High, right?”

  We nodded.

  “What grade are you in now?”

  “I’m going to be a senior,” Luke answered. “Ben’s going to be a junior.”

  Lyle gave a quick nod. “I didn’t quite make it out of old Choctaw High. I guess ya’ll heard about that.”

  Neither of us answered him.

  His face seemed to darken momentarily with the memory of that cataclysmic failure, then brighten just as quickly as he tried to shrug it off. “Well, is the old school still about the same?”

  “I guess,” Luke told him.

  Lyle’s grin took a cruel twist. “They let any niggers in yet?”

  Luke and I exchanged glances, then Luke said, “Not yet.”

  “I hear they’re going to,” Lyle said.

  Luke shook his head. “I haven’t heard anything about it.”

  “Well, good,” Lyle said softly. He glanced outside. The other men had boarded the back of the truck. “I gotta go now,” he said as he turned back to us. Then he gave Luke a gentle pat on the shoulder. “Ya’ll be good,” he said.

  With that, he strode out of Cuffy’s and hopped into the back of the truck. He was pulling the pack of Chesterfields from his shirt as it pulled away.

  “You think Lyle’s right?” Luke asked.

  I looked at him soberly, certain that he was referring to Lyle’s remark about “niggers” being admitted to Choctaw High.

  “About the Frito Pie,” Luke added before I could answer. “You think it’s any good?”

  I don’t remember my answer to that far less serious question, but I do recall that Luke tried the Frito Pie that afternoon, and that shortly after he’d finished it, he drove me to my house on Morgan Street.

  My father came home around seven that evening, and we ate dinner together. After that, he took his place in the chair by the window, reading the paper silently while I watched television.

  On those days when the past is like a movie endlessly playing in my head, I often think of him as he appeared on such evenings. I see him by the window, easing himself into the old chair, removing the rubber band that held the paper in a tight roll, then going through it page by page, concentrating, as he always did, on the darker side of things, stories about atrocious acts of violence, as if struggling to discover the single, irreducible source of such cruelty and murderousness in the way the ancient Greeks futilely searched for the single element from which, they supposed, all of earth’s variety had sprung. At last, he would shake his head, and say only, “There’s something missing in people who do things like that.”

  Was it the dread of this “something missing” that lay at the center of whatever moral teaching my father offered me? Fearing it, he often encouraged me to “know myself” and “be true to my convictions.” To have a firm identity, to fill the inner void with character, that was the goal of every life, the most it could achieve. If you did not achieve it, you were lost, and in your lostness, capable of something dreadful. When he spoke of some rapist or murderer he’d just read about in the newspaper, it was this “something missing” that always hovered mysteriously around the outrages they had committed.

  And so by the time I’d reached my sophomore year of high school, I was at least dimly aware that life could prove treacherous, that people might live well for a long time and then suddenly be swallowed up by the hole that had always secretly dwelled inside them.

  But that night, after I’d come home from Cuffy’s, my father didn’t speak to me about such things. Instead, he read silently for a while, then let the newspaper slip from his hands, pulled himself to his feet and headed down the hallway to his bedroom. On the way, he ruffled my hair a little and gave me his usual “Don’t stay up too late, now.”

  I went to bed a few hours after that, and I’m sure that during the interval before I fell asleep I must have thought of Kelli Troy, since something in the way she’d looked in the park that afternoon had already begun to attract me to her. With the same assurance, I can also say that I did not give Lyle Gates a single, fleeting thought.

  But I think of him often now. I see him move slowly down the
courthouse steps with Sheriff Stone walking massively at his side. It is raining, and Lyle’s shoulders are covered by the translucent plastic raincoat someone has draped around his slumped shoulders. My father stands next to me. He is wearing a gray hat, and I can see raindrops splattering onto its wide felt brim. I can see him clearly despite the slender watery trails that drift down the lenses of my glasses. The two of us stand side by side, part of a hushed crowd that has gathered on the courthouse steps. Lyle does not glance toward me as he passes, but merely continues on, his head lowered slightly, his hair drenched with rain as he is led down the stairs toward the waiting car. I look over toward my father. His eyes are still on Lyle, following his figure silently. I can see complicated things stirring in his head, unanswered questions, ideas he cannot voice, so that “There’s something missing in that boy” is all he says.

  CHAPTER 4

  THE NEW SCHOOL YEAR OPENED AT CHOCTAW HIGH ON the first Thursday in September. It was around eight that morning when my father pulled into the school’s gravel driveway. He was driving an old ’57 Chevy which he’d bought a week or so before, and which he gave me a few weeks later. It was gray and the left front fender was badly dented, but to me it was a gleaming chariot, and I had no doubt that once I’d graduated from high school, I would use it to escape Choctaw forever.

  I started to get out of the car as soon as my father brought it to a full stop, but I suddenly felt his hand touch my shoulder, looked back at him and saw that tender but oddly apprehensive expression I now give my daughter Amy, knowing, as I do, that she will soon be on her own, and that the world into which she is going is full of unexpected peril.

  “Be good, Ben” was all he said, but even then I recognized it more as a warning than a command, one which, in light of all that was soon to happen, still strikes me as eerily foreknowing.

  I nodded quickly and got out of the car. Once at the door of the school, I glanced back. The old gray Chevy was still sitting in the circular drive, my father behind the wheel, his face poised over its wide black arc. He nodded, lifted a finger, then jerked the car into gear and pulled away.

  Mr. Arlington had already arrived when I got to the classroom. He didn’t speak to me as I came through the door, but continued the job he’d already begun, taping pictures of Jefferson Davis and Abraham Lincoln on opposite sides of the blackboard.

  I took my usual seat near the middle of the room while Mr. Arlington went on with his task. On that day, he was the same age I am now, but he seemed terribly old to me, overweight and stoop-shouldered, with a wife who looked like the female version of himself.

  Before each class, Mr. Arlington would take off his jacket, pull down the tie, and roll up his shirtsleeves, as if teaching us were more a physical than an intellectual labor. He taught history, and in teaching it, he clearly relished the fact that he could occasionally impart what he took to be its Big Ideas. Grandly he would declare that those of us who did not learn from history would be doomed to repeat it. He said that history taught us various things, that power flowed into a vacuum, for example. He never hinted that outside Choctaw High these were commonplace ideas, little more than scholarly clichés, and certainly he never let on that he’d snatched them from the books of considerably wiser and more accomplished men. To some extent, I think he liked to play the role of intellectual mentor, while at the same time he must have realized that outside the closed world of a small-town high school he would hardly have struck an impressive figure. For beneath all the classroom posture, there was something self-conscious about him, something hesitant and deeply insecure. When caught in an error, he would color visibly, then turn toward the blackboard in order to conceal it. In class, he focused on debacles, usually military ones, moving at times disconnectedly from the Spanish Armada to Pickett’s Charge. I saw him as a buffoon and an impostor as a teacher. Because of that, the one lesson I might have learned from him—that it is possible to make a fatal error—was completely lost on me.

  The only other student in the room was a girl named Edith Sparks. She was dressed in a light blue blouse and black-and-white checked skirt with black pumps and white socks, and she’d taken her usual seat at the back of the room.

  “Hi,” I said to her.

  Edith regarded me distantly, as if slightly intimidated at being spoken to by one of the school’s “smart kids.”

  “Hi,” she said softly.

  She was not one of the “popular” girls, not one of the Turtle Grove crowd whose father was a doctor or a lawyer, owned a textile mill or sat on the board of one of the town’s banks. She was reasonably pretty, however, though only in the unstylish, countrified way of those girls who lived along the brow of the mountain, wore their lusterless brown hair to their waists and walked down the mountain road to school each day, clutching their books to their chests in the same way they would soon be clutching the first of their many brown-haired babies.

  “The summer went fast,” I said.

  She nodded. “Yeah, it did,” she said, then smiled shyly, as if wanting to continue the conversation, but at a loss as to how to do it.

  I’d known her since elementary school, but always as someone who lived within the blurry corners of school life, the type who took the class in home economics and seemed destined to marry a boy who took shop. She would live out her life in Choctaw and raise children like herself, a fate that struck me as inconceivably forlorn.

  Now, when I think of Edith, it is as a figure seated in the witness stand, her voice barely audible as she answers the questions put to her by Mr. Bailey. She is wearing what she must have thought of as appropriate courtroom dress, absurdly formal, complete with a dark pillbox that she’d no doubt borrowed from her mother. I can see her eyes dart nervously as Mr. Bailey questions her:

  And where did you see the defendant, Miss Sparks?

  Coming out of the woods.

  Whereabouts?

  Right there at the top of Breakheart Hill.

  What was he doing?

  He was wiping off his hands.

  With what?

  A handkerchief.

  Do you remember the color of the handkerchief?

  It was white.

  Could you see what he was wiping off his hands?

  Yes, sir.

  What did it look like, Miss Sparks?

  Blood.

  It was then that she’d glanced over to the defense table, then quickly back to Mr. Bailey, carefully following along as he led her toward that climactic moment when she pointed her trembling index finger squarely at the accused, and in a voice just loud enough for the room to hear it, uttered her final answer: Him.

  I still see Edith around Choctaw from time to time. She has aged prematurely, as farm women often do, with liver spots across her brow and the backs of her hands. She wears her hair in a bun and clothes herself in homemade dresses. We nod when we see each other. Her smile is as shy as it ever was, though now it reveals a scattering of stained teeth. We never speak. Still, as she passes by, I find that I cannot help but wonder if she ever hears the whir of a pickax as it slices through the summer air, or relives a single moment of her time upon the stand, the one instant in her life when the town actually took notice of her.

  But on that first day of school so many years ago, I found no reason to pay much attention to Edith Sparks, nor ever expected to find any. Certainly I felt no sense that another human life might someday rest within her primly folded hands.

  “I’m glad you got here a little early, Ben,” Mr. Arlington said when he finally turned away from the blackboard. “There’s something I wanted to ask you.” He leaned toward me, both hands resting on his desk. “What would you think of being this year’s editor of the Wildcat?”

  The Wildcat was the school newspaper, and as far as I could remember, Allison Cryer had always run it pretty much by herself.

  “I thought Allison was the editor,” I said.

  “Allison’s family has moved to Huntsville,” Mr. Arlington told me. “That’s why
I’m looking for someone to take over for her.” He hesitated a moment, as if reluctant to pay a compliment. “I noticed some of your writing in class last year, and I think you can handle it.”

  I said nothing, so Mr. Arlington added, “Editing the Wildcat’s not much work. And there’ll be a faculty adviser. A new teacher, a Miss Carver. She’ll give you all the help you need.”

  I shrugged. “Okay,” I said unenthusiastically, though in fact I felt honored at being chosen, grasping as I did in those days for any hint of recognition.

  “Good,” Mr. Arlington said as he began to gather up his things. “You’d better get to the assembly now.”

  There were no more than a hundred people in Choctaw’s senior class that year, and according to custom, they occupied the first two rows of the assembly hall. Luke sat only one row in front of me. He winked playfully when he saw me take my seat with the other juniors.

  The assembly hall was a large auditorium, complete with a curtained stage. It was the scene of almost all the school’s communal gatherings, everything from the pep rallies before the Friday night football game to the inspirational speeches of visiting guests. A wooden lectern rested at the center of the stage, and after everyone was seated, the school’s principal stepped up behind it.

  “I want to welcome all of you to Choctaw High School,” Mr. Avery said. His eyes swept down upon the first two rows of seats. “Especially to the senior class.”

  There was a raucous cheer, then an almost grudging return to silence as Mr. Avery continued, droning on about the coming year, ticking off the lengthy list of responsibilities that would be placed upon us. It was an exercise that seemed unbearably monotonous to me at the time, but which I have since recognized as Mr. Avery’s effort to form us into something solid, mold our misty, insubstantial personalities into the stuff of character.

  “So you will be challenged in many ways this year,” he said in conclusion, “and I hope that you will learn how to face challenges and be victorious over them.”