Breakheart Hill

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.”

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, though 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.