Breakheart Hill Page 8

  It took only twenty minutes or so to reach Collier, and on the way I continued to feel oddly moved by the story Kelli had told me. But I was troubled by it, too, for I had wanted, and perhaps even expected, her to point out the glories of someplace I might yet go rather than something grave and mysterious about the place I’d lived in all my life.

  “Have you read a lot about this area?” I asked.

  “A couple of books, that’s all,” Kelli answered.

  “Well, maybe you could write up the story of Lillith for the Wildcat. Sort of a local history column.”

  Kelli nodded.

  “Terrible story,” I added. “A father who tries to kill his daughter.”

  She had been staring straight ahead, her eyes on the open road, but she suddenly turned toward me. “It came out of love, though,” she said with an unexpected fierceness. “That makes all the difference, don’t you think?”

  I couldn’t answer then. Now I can. I see Mr. Bailey standing before the jury box, his hand lifting the photograph toward the twelve faces that loom behind it. I see their eyes stare at the picture he has presented to them, a young girl’s body as it lies twisted in a pool of vines. I hear his voice ring out again: Only hate can do a thing like this. And after that, Kelli’s earlier question, offered so innocently. Then my answer, as I would give it now: No, it makes no difference whatsoever.

  THE TROY HOMESTEAD LOOKED MUCH AS IT HAD ALWAYS looked, a small farmhouse with a wraparound porch stocked with several old wooden rocking chairs. Miss Troy sat rocking quietly in one of them as I pulled into the drive. The stylish clothes she’d worn so many years ago when she’d come into my father’s store had been cast aside by then, exchanged for the plain green dress and white apron she wore that afternoon. She was in her forties now, and as she came toward my car, I could see streaks of gray in her hair.

  “Thanks for taking me home,” Kelli said as she got out of the car.

  By then her mother had stepped up to the car and was peering in at me.

  “Mom, this is Ben Wade,” I heard Kelli say.

  The suspicion in Miss Troy’s face gave way slightly. “Luther Wade’s son?” she asked, still staring at me.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  She continued to watch me closely. “You were just a little boy when I saw you last,” she said.

  It was then that it all came back to me, the sleek, well-dressed woman who’d spoken in a strange accent, introduced herself to my father as “Miss Troy,” then tugged a dark, curly-haired little girl down the grocery aisle.

  “You were about six years old,” Miss Troy added. She glanced at Kelli. “Do you remember us going into Mr. Wade’s store?”

  Kelli shook her head.

  Miss Troy turned back toward me. “Well, tell your father I said hello.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  She headed back to the house, leaving Kelli still standing beside the car.

  Kelli leaned forward and stretched her hand toward me. “Well, thanks again for the lift.”

  I reached over and felt the thrill of her hand in mine, the first cool touch of her flesh.

  She drew her hand from mine almost immediately. “See you tomorrow,” she said.

  I did not want her to leave. Or at least, I wanted to make some kind of impression upon her before she did.

  “We’re going to make the Wildcat a really good paper, Kelli,” I told her. “The two of us, together.”

  She had already pulled herself from the window when she tossed back, “Yes, I think so, too.”

  It was the way she often spoke, with a casualness that seemed innocent and untroubled. Her first words to me had carried the same inconsequential air. But what later struck me with excruciating force was the fact that her last words had carried the same light, almost musical ring. Her voice at that final, fatal moment had been as full of trust as ever. Here, she’d said, handing me the rope. Hold this.

  CHAPTER 7

  WHEN I HEAR KELLI’S VOICE IN MY MEMORY, IT TAKES ON an astonishingly real presence and immediacy, as if her lips were poised at my ear. Other voices come from a great distance. My father’s, for example, and Miss Troy’s. But Kelli’s voice always sounds so clear and near at hand that when I hear it, I almost glance reflexively to the right or left, half expecting to see her face. Sometimes I hear it at night as I sit alone in the front porch swing, at other times while moving through my hospital rounds with a nurse or doctor at my side. But no matter where or when I hear it, the tone and clarity are always the same, as rich and vital as if she were still fully alive and standing beside me, a voice so physically present that at times it seems as if my memory has become her ghost.

  I never see her, though, never glimpse an eerie, disembodied shape as it retreats down a darkened hallway or vanishes into a hazy wood. When she comes to me, it is down the long tunnel of the years, never as a specter floating outside my bedroom window, or a figure drifting toward me over the still waters of a dark lake. There are times when I almost wish that she did return to me in such melodramatic form, a mere phantom that I could sweep away with a quick wave of my hand.

  Instead, she rises invisibly and without warning from a vast assortment of familiar things. I will notice a footprint in moist earth, a length of rope dangling from a limb, a young man trudging absently up the mountain road, and suddenly all these things will take their place within the mystery that Sheriff Stone worked so hard to solve.

  He died almost fifteen years ago, an old man eaten to the bone by cancer. He hadn’t chosen me as his doctor, but when I heard that he was dying, I dropped by his hospital room to see him. He was lying on his back, fully lucid, but very weak. I said hello as I stepped up to his bed, but he didn’t answer me, and after a while I turned to leave the room. It was then I felt his hand. He had reached over and grabbed my sleeve, tugging at it as insistently as he could with the little strength left to him.

  I reached down, took his hand, placed it firmly on his chest and gave it a soft, consoling pat. “Are you comfortable, Sheriff Stone?” I asked him gently.

  His eyes suddenly flared up, as if, coming from me, the question had filled him with contempt. “No, I’m not,” he said in a harsh, rasping voice. “Are you?”

  I started to give him a casual reply, but he’d already turned away.

  Sheriff Stone was not always so abrupt, and when he first came to talk to me that day, he gave off a great sense of self-control and composure. He was a large man, round and bearish, but he carried himself with unexpected grace. Rarely armed, he generally relied on the strength of his character to get what he wanted from the people who came within his authority. “The last of his kind” was what my father called him, and I think that he was right.

  He’d already been sheriff of Choctaw County for over thirty years by the time he first questioned me, and he possessed the impressive serenity of a man who knew a great many secrets but who also had the will to keep them to himself. He nodded gently, touched the brim of his hat and introduced himself. “I’m Sheriff Stone,” he said. He shifted his great weight in the doorway. “I understand that you knew Kelli Troy.”

  Much time has passed since Sheriff Stone first questioned me, but on occasion, when I drive past the town cemetery, I will glance up toward the large gray stone that marks his place, feel a wave of intense heat sweep over me and realize that his grave has joined that vast collection of other things in Choctaw that can, in a sudden feverish rush, bring Kelli back to me.

  And yet, even more than such wrenching physical reminders, it is my memory itself that keeps her near me, forever playing back the time that was left to her, revealing each moment in turn, her days falling from the stem of life like small white petals.

  THE SHEER VIBRANCY OF THOSE DAYS STRIKES ME MOST powerfully when I think of them, how alive she was, the sparks that seemed to fly from her, particularly as she neared the end. She threw a great deal of effort into the Wildcat, but I could tell that even after working on it all afternoon, there was still ener
gy left over that she could not use. “I want to do something,” she once told me as we drove toward her house one evening, “but I don’t know what.” She shivered slightly. “It’s like your skin is wrapped too tight around you.”

  I am old enough now to know that fiery personalities sometimes consume themselves prematurely, and that those people who appear the most spirited when young are not necessarily the ones who later make a great mark. Life remains a card shark, after all, with many tricks to play, and when I consider that Eddie Smathers is one of Choctaw’s wealthiest and most respected citizens, that Todd Jeffries is already in his grave, that Sheila Cameron’s life is wrapped in an unrelievable grief, I am struck by how easily it can throw down an unexpected card. Perhaps Kelli, too, would have fallen into one of the many traps that cripple and misdirect us, altering our early dreams, turning passionate beginnings into modest ends. As time passed, Kelli might have proven no better at improvising her way out of the common snares of life than most of us have proven.

  But that was not a possibility that Mr. Bailey wanted the jury to consider when he spoke to them for the last time. He began his summation by handing a photograph of Kelli to the foreman and telling him to pass it down the line. From my seat near the front of the courtroom, I could see that it was the one that had been taken early that spring, a school photograph that showed Kelli’s face wreathed in dark curls. “From everything we know about this young girl,” he said, “we have to conclude that Kelli Troy would have lived a good, and perhaps even a remarkable life.”

  Miss Troy was sitting only a few feet from me when Mr. Bailey said that, and I remember that it was precisely at that moment that she broke down for the one and only time during the long ordeal of the trial, lowering her face into her hands, her shoulders trembling as she wept.

  It is the curse of memory to dwell on possibility, to consider not only what was, but what might have been. Sometimes in the evening, when I am returning from a patient’s house, and find myself on the road that leads from Choctaw to Collier, I will see the little square lights of Kelli’s house, and suddenly I will be unable to pass by, but will edge my car onto the shoulder of the road, stop and stare for a time at the small glowing windows, the old wooden porch, the unused brick chimney. Sometimes on these occasions, I will see her as she was, rushing down the stairs toward my car with a bundle of schoolbooks in her arms, all youth and energy, with most of the journey still before her. But at other times, I will see her as she might have become, older and wiser, her hair threaded with gray, her character shaped by a deeper and longer experience of life, moving more slowly toward me, opening her arms, rich and beautiful in the fullness of her womanhood. Then I see her not as she might have become but as she was left that day on Breakheart Hill. I see the devastation that was done to her, see her as Luke did before he raced up the hill for help. I see her blood glistening on my hands as it glistened on his trousers. But I do not dash away as he did. For I know, as Luke could not have known, that there is no help for her, no way to mend her wounds. And so I do the only thing I can. I kneel down beside her, gather her broken life into my arms, and say her name.

  “KELLI,” I SAID, “WHAT DO YOU THINK OF THIS?”

  We were sitting in the little basement office late one afternoon only a week or so after we started working together on the Wildcat. She was at her desk, a small wooden one that had been pushed up against the room’s back wall.

  I handed her the paper. “It’s one of those gossip things Allison used to put in every issue,” I added. “June Compton gave it to me this morning.”

  Kelli took it from me, brought it under the lamp on her desk and read it out loud. “Trouble in paradise. Be on the lookout for a breakup.” She looked at me. “Who’s it about?”

  I shrugged. “Some Turtle Grove couple,” I said. “That’s all June knows about, the people out there.”

  I was right, as it turned out, and no more than fifteen minutes later Mary Diehl appeared at the door of the basement office. She was wearing a navy blue blouse and a black skirt, and thrown into silhouette by the light from the corridor she looked like a charred figure, motionless and silent until Kelli finally looked up from her desk and caught her standing there.

  “Hi, Kelli,” Mary said softly. Her eyes swept over to me. “Hi, Ben. Ya’ll working on the Wildcat?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  Mary struggled to smile, clinging to that iron charm her mother had taught her to maintain in all circumstances. “Well, I just wanted to ask if June Compton gave you something to put in it.”

  “Yeah, she did,” I answered.

  “Well, do you think you could give it to me, Ben?” Mary asked. She glanced self-consciously at Kelli, then back to me. “It’s sort of personal, and I don’t want it put in the Wildcat.”

  For some reason, I hesitated. Perhaps because I wanted, no matter how briefly, to feel a certain delicious power over Mary Diehl, who, under other circumstances, would hardly have noticed me at all. “Well, I’d like to give it to you, Mary, but I should probably read it first.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t, Ben.” Mary’s voice trembled slightly. “It’s private, you know?”

  “I know, Mary,” I said. “But as the editor of the paper I have to …”

  I heard Kelli’s chair scrape against the cement floor, then saw her body sweep past my desk.

  “Here it is, Mary,” she said, handing her the paper. “June gave it to Ben this morning. We haven’t even had a chance to read it yet.”

  Mary snapped the paper from Kelli’s hand with an almost frantic motion. “It’s nothing bad, really,” she explained hastily. “But June’s just such a busybody, you know, and—” She stopped, her voice suddenly less tense, relief sweeping into her face. “Well, anyway, thanks for giving it back,” she said. She folded the paper, sunk it into the pocket of her skirt and stepped back into the corridor, now suddenly herself again, fully a girl from Turtle Grove, all her grace and poise regained.

  “Bye,” she said, then vanished.

  Once Mary had gone, I tried to make light of the whole thing. “That breakup stuff must have been about her and Todd. They must be having trouble.”

  Kelli had already returned to her desk, but she looked up at me pointedly, her eyes cold and stern. “You should have given it to her right away,” she said.

  “What do you mean?” I asked, though I already knew.

  “You made her beg, Ben,” Kelli said. “Why did you do that?”

  I had no answer for her. “You’re right,” I admitted. “I should have just given the paper back to her.”

  Kelli watched me evenly, her face so grave it appeared almost stony. Her eyes were nearly motionless, two black pools, but I could sense her mind moving rapidly behind them, remembering, evaluating, coming to judgment.

  For a moment I feared she might never speak to me again, but suddenly the severity broke, and she smiled. “It must be nice though,” she said almost airily.

  “Nice?” I asked, now completely thrown off by the abrupt change in her attitude. “What must be nice?”

  “To love someone like that,” Kelli answered. “The way Mary loves Todd.” She smiled quietly. “To feel desperate about losing someone.”

  It seemed the right moment to make a cautious inquiry. “Have you ever felt that way about anybody?” I asked.

  She shook her head. “No. But I hope I do someday.”

  I started to say something else, but she turned away, returning to her work, closing off any further discussion.

  For the next hour we worked silently. Then suddenly she demanded, “Would you have run it?”

  So much time had passed that I didn’t know what she was referring to. “Run what?”

  “That note June gave you. Would you have put it in the Wildcat?”

  I turned to face her. “I don’t know. I might have.” I shrugged. “But I hope that if I had run it, I would have been disappointed in myself later. That’s the worst thing you can do, right? To disappo
int yourself.” I looked at her quietly for a moment, then added, “Or disappoint someone else. Someone you admire. That’s the worst thing, don’t you think?”

  Kelli shook her head. “No, the worst thing is for someone you love to disappoint you,” she said with a sudden, unexpected vehemence. “That’s what’s really bad.” Her eyes narrowed, and I could see an odd tumult in them, though it was also clear that the cause of it was not something Kelli wanted to reveal. She glanced away quickly, then turned back to me, her eyes calm again. “Anyway, I’m glad we gave June’s note back to Mary,” she said.

  “Me, too,” I said.

  We closed the office a few minutes later, then strolled out to the parking lot. Kelli did not have a car, and so on the days we worked late, I drove her home to Collier. It was dark when we reached her house, and outside the car I could hear the whistle of a chill fall wind.

  “Better wrap up,” I said, nodding toward the checked scarf that now dangled loosely from Kelli’s throat.

  She looked at me oddly, as if surprised by my care. “Yes, I will,” she murmured. Then she leaned forward, reached over and took my hand. “Thanks, Ben.”

  It was a small gesture of affection, nothing more, and yet I can still recall the tingling sense of her flesh on mine, the way it seemed to linger on my skin long after she’d drawn away her hand. And I know that with every day that passed from that moment on, my longing for her steadily increased, along with the troubling sense of my own physical awkwardness and lack of experience, my “virginity” no longer merely a vaguely regrettable and embarrassing fact in my mind, but a subtle accusation of unmanliness and inadequacy, the first seed of my self-loathing.

  But that was something Kelli could not have known, and so, as the days passed, she continued to act toward me as any young girl might, casually touching me from time to time, no doubt thinking me as harmless as I thought myself, but by each touch turning up the heat one small degree.