Breakheart Hill Page 5

  Once he’d finished, Mr. Avery introduced the president of the senior class. Todd Jeffries was undoubtedly the “catch” of his class, the one all the girls swooned over, though none had been able to sway him from his devotion to the dark-haired beauty, Mary Diehl. He was tall, with short sandy hair and blue eyes, and for as long as anyone could remember he had been the school’s unchallenged superstar in both football and basketball. But he was also modest and studious, with an air of something tentative about him, as if distrustful of his own high status.

  “I’m not much of a speaker,” he said as he shifted uncomfortably behind the lectern that morning, “but I just want to give a special welcome to the new freshman class at Choctaw High this year.” He smiled warmly, but a little self-consciously as well, the way handsome men and beautiful women often smile, quickly and discreetly, futilely trying not to dazzle the rest of us. “You may feel a little lost at first,” he went on, “but it doesn’t take long to get the hang of it, and I’m sure you’ll feel right at home before long.”

  There was quite a burst of applause when Todd sat down, along with some hooting and whistling from his football teammates, a display that appeared to embarrass him a little.

  There were a few more speakers after that, various club presidents and student council officials. Then, at the end of the assembly, a girl named June Compton gave a kind of eulogy for Allison Cryer, as if, in leaving Choctaw High, Allison had died rather than simply moved to Huntsville. During the course of her little speech, June mentioned Allison’s long editorship of the Wildcat. Almost as an aside, and looking down at a hastily scribbled note, she announced that “Ben Wade” had been selected as the new editor.

  With that, the assembly ended and the entire student body made its chaotic way out of the auditorium. Near the door, Luke caught up with me and gave me a slap on the back.

  “So, you’re doing the Wildcat,” he said brightly.

  “Mr. Arlington made me,” I told him a little sourly, not wanting to appear as if in any sense I welcomed the job.

  “Maybe you can turn it into something,” Luke said. He laughed. “All Allison ever did was print sports scores and gossip from the Turtle Grove crowd.”

  Once we’d passed through the door, Luke took a sharp turn and headed down the stairs, while I went into the main building to my first class.

  The teacher came in just behind me, and when I first saw her, I thought she must be a new student at Choctaw rather than a new teacher. This was the Miss Carver who would be helping me edit the Wildcat, a pale, thin young woman with reddish hair, the sort that always appeared brittle and unruly.

  She took her place behind the desk. “I’m Miss Carver,” she told us in a high, clear voice, then drew a large plastic bag onto the top of the desk, opened it and pulled out a stack of papers. “I’ve mimeographed copies of the reading list,” she said as she stepped around the desk and began to distribute them.

  When she’d finished, she returned to the front of the room and gave the class a quick, tentative smile. “This is my first year teaching, so I’ll probably make a few mistakes. I hope you’ll be patient with me.” The smile broadened, but awkwardly, as if unable to find its proper place on her face. “I’ll also be in charge of the school play at the end of the year, so from time to time I’ll be asking for ideas from you about what play we should do.” She continued on, talking quietly, outlining what she hoped to do in the coming months. She mentioned various books that we’d soon be reading, and I remember her saying that Wuthering Heights would be the first of them and Ethan Frome the last. These books were among her personal favorites, she told us, because they dealt so powerfully with what she called “doomed love.”

  It was the sort of opening statement I had grown accustomed to over the years, teachers forever trying to convince their students that there was something to be gained from learning what they taught. Faithful to my “smart kid” image, I tried to pay close attention to Miss Carver, but after a time, my eyes began to wander about the room, first from one side of the blackboard to the other, then up the wall and along the molding at the ceiling and finally back down again, drifting up the row of desks at the opposite end of the room, cruising the listless faces of my classmates until they stopped at Kelli Troy’s.

  She was not exactly transfixed as she sat in the back corner of the room listening to Miss Carver’s plans for us, but she was attentive and strangely serious. No one had introduced her, as they usually did with new students, and I found out later that Kelli had specifically asked not to be singled out. She was wearing a light blue short-sleeved blouse and a plaid skirt that fell just below her knees, a style of dress hardly distinguishable from the other girls in the class. In fact, only one thing set her apart. On her finger she wore a slender wedding band of tarnished silver, which seemed a strange thing for a young girl to have.

  I pulled my eyes away and concentrated on Miss Carver.

  “I think that people can learn a lot from reading about what other people have gone through,” she said. “That’s the most important thing reading can do for you.”

  No one in the class gave the slightest hint that anything she’d said was worth hearing, and in response, Miss Carver fell silent for a moment, her eyes lowering somewhat, as if she were searching for the key that might unlock us. In that pose, she looked terribly young, hardly more than a girl, frightened and unsure of herself, as if waiting for us to leap at her, to tear her limb from limb. Later it would strike me that a deep innocence had surrounded her that morning, that it was like the soft sheen I have since noticed in newborn skin, and that because of it, it would never have occurred to me that she was far more knowing than she seemed to be, more able to discern the hidden pathways and secret chambers within those she came to know, or that through the dense, hovering gloom that shrouded Breakheart Hill, Miss Carver would be the first to glimpse the truth.

  THE REST OF THAT FIRST SCHOOL DAY WENT BY IN A STIFLING, muggy haze. It was the first week of September, and as usual in the Deep South, the weather had remained quite hot. The school had high windows, and the teachers kept them open to give us what relief we could get from the limp breezes that sometimes wafted through them. But there were no fans in the school, and certainly no air-conditioning, so that by the end of the day, when the final bell rang and we staggered out into the open air again, we felt as if some long, dull torture had at last come to an end.

  Luke was standing beside his truck when I reached the parking lot. He pulled off his cap and wiped his forehead with his bare arm. “Can you believe this heat?” he asked.

  I shook my head at the hellishness of it.

  “I thought they might let us out early, but hell no, we had to go through the whole day.”

  I nodded. “I saw that girl,” I told him. “The one in the park when we were playing tennis.”

  “Yeah, me, too,” Luke said. “In the hall a couple of times.”

  “She’s in my English class.”

  Luke grabbed the collar of his shirt and tugged it from the skin around his throat. “I can’t believe they didn’t let us out early,” he said again. “Anyway, let’s go down to Cuffy’s and get something cold.”

  We got into Luke’s truck and seconds later pulled out of the parking lot. I glanced toward the school as we went by it, already hoping, I suppose, for a glimpse of Kelli Troy, but letting my gaze settle on the school as well. It seemed unbearable that I still had two years to go, and I know that when I drew my eyes away, it was with the disquieting sense that my imprisonment within its high brick walls and gabled rooms would never end.

  I see it differently now, from the viewpoint of a different kind of prison. It has been closed for nearly twenty years, replaced by the much larger and more modern building my daughter attends, one with sleek, unblemished halls, state-of-the-art lighting and winking computer screens. No plans exist either to reopen it, or to tear it down, so it continues to stand where it always has, an abandoned ruin at the foot of the mountain, thou
gh now adorned by the flower garden that Luke, in his continuing effort to beautify Choctaw, has planted on its broad front lawn.

  Sometimes in the evening, when I’ve come down the mountain from the small, rural clinic I visit twice a month, I’ve let my eyes drift over toward the old building’s unlighted face, its silent bell tower robed in vines, its redbrick walls slowly crumbling into dust. At those moments, I’ve tried to imagine what it must look like inside the building now, with the wind slithering through cracked windowpanes, prowling the empty rooms and corridors, and finally lifting a ghostly dust up the broad staircase that rises to the second floor. I see no one, not even shadows. I hear none of the voices that once echoed down its hallways, nor even so much as the familiar sound of padding feet, groaning stairs or the clang of metal lockers. All I sense is its profound emptiness. It’s then that I’ve felt the urge to make the decision our town’s administrators have yet to make, to call in the wreckers with their heavy balls and pounding hammers, and let them do their work, administer, at last, the long-awaited coup de grâce.

  Then I’ve glimpsed the flowers Luke has planted along the deserted walkway, small blooms in a great darkness, and thought, Not yet.

  CHAPTER 5

  IT IS ODD HOW MANY THINGS CAN BRING IT ALL BACK TO ME, sometimes even the most inconsequential things, perhaps no more than a chance remark. Only a few hours before I joined Luke at Miss Troy’s funeral, I examined a man in his early seventies who was complaining of shortness of breath, something he called a “summer cold,” but which could have been anything from a relatively minor allergic reaction to heart failure. The exchange that followed was entirely routine.

  “Do you smoke, Mr. Price?” I asked.

  “No.”

  “Have you been having this trouble for a long time?”

  “The cold, you mean?”

  “The shortness of breath.”

  “Awhile, I guess. But this time it was different.”

  “How was it different?”

  “Well, it was fast, the way it come on me. All of a sudden, I just couldn’t get a breath.”

  “Where were you when that happened?”

  “Walking across the pasture.”

  “In high grass?”

  “Weeds mostly. And those little yellow flowers, the ones that grow all around.”

  “Goldenrod.”

  “That’s right. They’re all over the place. Especially this summer, the way it’s dragged on so long. Reminds me of the one we had back in ’62.”

  And with that one innocent reference, past and present collide, and I smell the violets again, feel the lingering heat of that summer long ago, and with it, the sharp urge that seized me so powerfully.

  “You were still in high school back then, I guess,” the man says. He smiles wistfully. “Lord, at that age, the girls sure are pretty.”

  And suddenly I see Kelli standing alone in a wide field of gently swaying goldenrod, her face very still, thoughtful, as if she is considering some aspect of a future she will never have. In such a pose she seems every bit as fiercely self-possessed as she was, confident of what lay ahead, with no sense that something might be lurking in the deep, concealing grass.

  I feel my lips part with a whispered “So young.”

  The man looks at me curiously. “What’s that you say?”

  “Nothing,” I tell him, and the vision disappears, replaced by the sound of sirens as the ambulance and police cars rush up the mountain road to the place where Luke has summoned them, a sound that never really fades after that, but wails on through the generations.

  “Nothing,” I repeat as I begin to examine him again. But I know that it is everything.

  THE SUMMER OF 1961 SEEMED TO LAST FOREVER. THE HEAT dragged on through the month of September, and the leaves remained green long past their season. It became a major topic of conversation in Choctaw, the men in the barbershop endlessly pondering the strangeness of it, the preachers marveling at God’s hand, the way He could stop the motion of the world, turn the seasons into fixed stars. October came and went, and still the green held its place, though toward the end of that month, the first lighter shadings began to outline the ridges that hung above us, and after that, the first yellows appeared, quite suddenly, as if sprinkled over the mountainside in a single night.

  The human world went on as usual, of course. Slowly, the students of Choctaw High accepted the school routine. Mr. Arlington gave his first test, and before handing them back, he read one of my answers to the class. “Very well organized, Ben,” he told me, while several of my less well-organized fellow students winked at one another and shifted in their seats.

  Miss Carver seemed less at loose ends by the end of October. We had finished reading Wuthering Heights by then, and most of us were working on the first essay she’d assigned. The topic was “The Perfect Husband,” and several students, all of them boys, had groaned when she’d written it on the board. Miss Carver had stood her ground, however, and eventually we all began to explore the subject, save for Marvin Craddock, who was mildly retarded and who had simply been passed from grade to grade over the years, as was the custom in those days.

  Luke went out for the football team, and got a position as running back. For a while he seemed elated, and I even remember brooding that he might finally cast me aside and join the clique that orbited around the shining sun of Todd Jeffries, but he never did. At the first game he played well enough, but never with the kind of bone-crunching enthusiasm that Eddie Smathers tried to show, particularly when Todd was on the field, and which had already earned Eddie a reputation as being, in Luke’s words, “Todd Jeffries’s personal ass-lick.”

  As for Todd himself, except for the Friday night football games when he was clearly the star figure, he seemed less visible during that first six weeks. He spoke a few times at the weekly assembly, but always briefly, and with his eyes slightly averted. It was a look that deepened as the years passed, so that in midlife he would often cross the street to avoid contact with a fellow villager, sometimes roughly jerking his little boy, Raymond, along behind him. And it was a look that was still on his face the last time I saw him. He had just pulled the oxygen mask from his mouth and his breath was coming in sharp gasps. His body was now round and doughy, his face puffed and bloated, his skin swollen into soft folds, slack at the neck and along the once-sleek line of his jaw.

  His son, Raymond, sat, slumped loosely, in a chair in the corner. At twenty-six, he already looked nearly twice that age, overweight and balding, with small, darting eyes. “Daddy’s going finally,” he said icily as I stepped up to Todd’s bed.

  Todd’s eyes fluttered open briefly, and for a few seconds he stared at the ceiling with that look I remembered from his youth, baffled and ill at ease. Then he lapsed back into unconsciousness, the oxygen mask still clutched in his hand. I started to return it to his mouth, but Raymond stopped me.

  “Leave it off,” he said sharply. “Just let him go.”

  “But, Raymond, your father needs the—”

  “Just let him go,” Raymond said, his voice now very stern, determined. And I saw him again as a little boy clinging fearfully to his mother’s hand as I knelt down to stare into the swollen purple folds that nearly closed over his left eye, silent and unsmiling, when I jokingly asked him if he’d done the same damage to the other guy.

  “Just let him go,” Raymond repeated, raising himself from his seat slightly, as if prepared to pounce. “It’s what he wants. To die. It’s what he’s always wanted.”

  I nodded, drew my hand away from the mask and made no further effort to intervene. “All right,” I said. Then I let my eyes drift back toward Todd, at his unconscious yet strangely anguished face.

  It was not a scene I could have imagined thirty years before. For in the fullness of his youth, Todd had looked almost immortal, tall and broad-shouldered, a local god, complete with his own minions, and a goddess forever at his side.

  And Mary Diehl was a goddess, I suppose. Cert
ainly she was as beautiful as any girl might ever wish to be. Luke practically drooled when she went past him in the school corridor, and Eddie Smathers was so struck by her that he seemed afraid to stand near her. Mary was tall, with long dark hair, and her eyes were a deep blue. But it was her skin that everyone noticed, a smooth ivory, as if each day she put it on anew so that it remained entirely without blemish. Even now, so much later in life, when she sits silently in the white room that is now her home, her skin still glows with the same ghostly sheen, and there are moments, as I sit with her, stroking her hand, when all her youthful beauty suddenly returns to her, miraculously returns, as if the work of time were no less impermanent than the things it turns to dust.

  And so even now it seems odd to me that during all my high school years I never felt the slightest desire for Mary Diehl, and that she seemed nothing more than the female version of Todd Jeffries, godlike and utterly remote, and in whose presence I felt more like an insect than a person, small to the point of invisibility.

  And yet it was finally Kelli Troy who seemed the most remote of all.

  As it turned out, we had only one class together, Miss Carver’s, but I saw Kelli often during the day, sometimes standing at her locker, sometimes sitting on the front steps, sometimes heading toward the line of yellow buses that waited in the school driveway in the afternoon. She took the one that headed toward Collier, a rural community some ten miles from Choctaw, and she always sat near the front, either reading or staring silently out the window. She hadn’t spoken in class very often, and we had never done more than greet each other casually outside it, but that first allure still clung to her, and in any group my eye would single her out, as if in a large tableau she had been painted by a separate hand, one that was stronger and more skilled. In class, I listened to her comments more carefully than I listened to the others, and more carefully responded to them. I held back smiles, not wanting to appear boyish, and compliments, not wanting to fawn upon her. I had entered that early, vaguely calculating stage of secret courtship in which you premeditate and approve every word and gesture, and yet I can’t say that at that early point I was swept away by her. There is a kind of love that penetrates you painlessly, like the tiniest of needles, working its way through you so slowly and secretively that you do not feel it as a sudden sting, but as a steadily intensifying atmosphere.