Breakheart Hill

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. Certainly 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.

So it was with Kelli Troy.

Still, there are times when I imagine it another way, as a sudden, heaving passion, the two of us in the grips of a love like Catherine and Heathcliff’s, the one I was reading about in Wuthering Heights that fall. I have even imagined a destiny that might follow such a passion. In this particular fantasy, there is a moment of mad love, and after that, Kelli and I flee Choctaw on a train, the two of us huddled in a boxcar, clutching each other, laughing wildly as the lights grow small and the valley broadens hour after hour until it finally opens up and fans out like a great bay, and it is dawn, and we are young, and nothing real ever touches us again.

Or this less improbable rendering: A letter comes. It is from the medical school of a great university in Boston or New York. There is a place for me. There is money for me. I show it to Kelli, then take her naked shoulders in my hands. I say, “Come with me.” She draws herself more tightly into my arms and presses her face against my chest, and I know that her answer is yes.

At other times, the same hands reach out for the same bare shoulders, but she does not face me. Instead, she is running up the steep slope that leads to the mountain road, running like they ran, the ones she later told me about, the ones who gave their name to Breakheart Hill.

For what really happened never truly leaves me, no matter how often my imagination insists upon rewriting it. I hear the blow that echoed through the trees, see her fall to the ground, then rise and begin to stagger up the killing slope, arms reaching for her as she lunges through the undergrowth. I hear her moan as she sinks, exhausted, to the ground, then the sound of footsteps as they close in upon her from the crest of Breakheart Hill, and finally her last words, spoken as the final glimmer of her consciousness flickered out. And after that each life returns to me, each life that was destroyed in the deep woods that day, their faces circling in my mind, one behind the other, like heads on a potter’s wheel.

A FEW YEARS AGO LUKE SUDDENLY TURNED TO ME. “WHERE do you think it all started, Ben?” he asked. We had just finished putting away the grill after a Sunday cookout with our families, and I had no idea what he was referring to.

“What started?” I asked.

“Whatever it was that led to Breakheart Hill.”

I stared at him silently, unable to speak, surprised at how abruptly he had brought it up again, how tenaciously he had refused to let it go, as if that first doubt, the one I’d glimpsed so long ago, had opened a hole within him that nothing since had filled.

Luke shifted, motioning me toward two lawn chairs at the far side of the yard. “I think about it sometimes,” he said as we walked along together. “About where it started.”

Suddenly I recalled the look on his face the afternoon it had happened. Even from a distance, as he’d climbed out of his truck and come toward me, I’d recognized the change that had come over him. His face was somehow more deeply lined, as if he’d aged instantly at the sight of her. But his voice, in its wounded bafflement and incomprehension, still sounded young. “Ben, something bad … Kelli … something really bad.”

I glanced toward the line of white roses he’d planted along the fence of his backyard. “I guess everything has a beginning.” I spoke almost casually, despite the fact that I could feel something rise in me, a prisoner clamoring for release. “Even something like that,” I added, trying to relieve the building pressure.

Luke did not look at me, but I could sense the restlessness that had suddenly enveloped him. “Maybe especially something like that,” he said as if sternly reminding himself of his purpose. “A specific cause. One thing.”

It was at that moment I realized that Luke had never believed the founding tale of his own religion, that all evil flowed from one immemorial sin so that each one of us was merely one small drop in the river of souls that had flowed out of Eden, the origin of the harm we did untraceably remote. He was not seeking the comfort of such distance or the peace of its acceptance. He was stubbornly looking for the truth.

I felt a sudden grave appreciation for the frankness of his quest, and in a moment of unguarded admiration I released a clue. “Maybe it began with something innocent,” I told him.

His eyes shot over to me. “Like what?”

I recalled that first connection and improvised an answer. “Like a poem, for example. That first poem she wrote.”

Luke continued to stare at me, but said nothing.

“I mean, if she hadn’t written that first …” I began, then felt a stab of fear, the old secrecy gather around me once again, and stopped.

Luke looked at me quizzically. “What?”

I shook my head. “I don’t know.”

I think he must have seen the dread in my face, because he glanced away, eased himself farther back into his chair and fell silent for a long time. Sitting beside him, I could feel the doubt that had never left him from that first moment he’d rushed across my yard to tell me what he’d seen at the crest of Breakheart Hill. He’d barely been able to speak, but he’d struggled hard to do it, sputtering desperately that “something bad” had happened to Kelli Troy. His eyes had concentrated on my face with a terrible fierceness as he’d labored to get it out, repeating again and again, Something bad, Ben, something bad. I had stared at him silently while he’d worked to tell me what he’d seen, and I know that in a single flashing instant he’d glimpsed something terrible in the dead stillness of my eyes, the grim silence with which I waited for him to get it out, something that spoke words I did not speak, but which he heard anyway, and which answered his feverish “something bad, something bad” with a cool I know.

“Those roses I planted last year are really going strong,” Luke said quietly after a moment.

A wave of relief swept over me, as if I’d been granted a stay of execution. “Yes, they are,” I told him. And for all the peace it might have granted him, I could not tell him more.

BY THE SECOND WEEK IN OCTOBER I WAS PUTTING THE finishing touches on the first issue of the Wildcat. I had tried to enlist a few volunteers, but none had come forward, and so most of the work had fallen to me. I had rejected practically nothing that came to me. Because of that, I was stuck with the same sort of articles Allison Cryer had always published, little nature essays, recipes, sports and even tidbits of school gossip, blind items usually, and almost always written by the same people who’d written them for Allison. The issue was dull, but I didn’t care. The Wildcat had been dull when Allison ran it, and it would continue to be dull. It was like everything else in Choctaw, as I saw it, mediocre, and doomed to eternal mediocrity.

The small room the school had set aside for the Wildcat was in the basement, only a few feet from the boiler, and barely larger than a closet. Inside, there were a couple of ancient wooden desks, two old typewriters, a few rulers for layout and a stack of white paper. The furnishings were so spare and run-down that it was hard for me to imagine Allison Cryer working in such a place. And yet, the signs of her long tenure and abrupt departure were also there—stacks of movie and fashion magazines, a diet book for teenagers, a broken eyeliner pencil, all of which I immediately threw out and eventually replaced with those remnants of myself that Sheriff Stone would later find in the same cramped room—a guide to medical schools in the United States, a copy of A Lost Lady and a picture of Kelli Troy standing in a white sleeveless dress at the crest of Breakheart Hill.

It had become my habit to work on the Wildcat each afternoon after school. I would go to the room in the basement, drop into the seat behind the table and begin reading some new submission or working on the layout. It was a solitary place, the kind I liked best, and there were times when I would close the door and simply let my mind drift among life’s possibilities. The closed room freed me from the usual distractions so that my imagination could flow unhindered into the amazing future.

I was probably doing exactly that the afternoon I heard a soft knock, then watched as the door swung open slowly. She stood in a dense shadow, backlit by the harsh light of the outer corridor, but I recognized her instantly.

“Hi,” I said, then for some reason took off my glasses and began rubbing the lenses with my shirttail.

“Hi.”

I returned the glasses to my eyes. “Are you looking for somebody?” I asked.

“You,” Kelli said.

“Me?”

“Miss Carver said you’d be down here. That’s why I came down. To bring you this.” She drew a piece of folded paper from the pocket of her skirt. “It’s a poem. Do you publish poems in the Wildcat?”

“I publish just about anything in it,” I told her with a small, sour laugh.

She looked at me sternly, as if in disapproval. “You mean, whether it’s any good or not?”

I gave her a worldly shrug. “Well, I don’t have a lot to choose from,” I explained. “You know, just typical high school stuff. Choctaw High. Rah. Rah. Rah.”

My answer did not appear to satisfy her, but she said nothing else. Instead, she simply handed me the paper.

“It’s just a few lines. If you don’t like it, you can tell me.”

She had crowned me with an unexpected authority, and I remember briefly reveling in it. “Okay,” I said. “But no matter what, it’s probably better than most of the stuff I get in.” I glanced toward the paper. “You want me to read it now?”

“No,” Kelli answered decisively. “Later.”

“Okay.”

She lingered a moment longer, perhaps reluctant to leave her poem behind. “Well, I have to get to the bus,” she said finally. She stepped away from the door, out into the full light of the corridor and stood facing me. “I guess you’ll let me know.”

“Tomorrow,” I told her, my hand involuntarily jerking up, as if reaching for her as she fled away, “I’ll read it tonight and talk to you tomorrow.”

She nodded briskly, turned and headed down the corridor.

I rose immediately, stepped into the hallway and looked after her.

She was already several yards away by then, her figure disappearing up the stairs at the far end of the hallway.

I returned to my desk, unfolded the paper she’d given me and read what she’d written, my eyes following the lines in a room that still gave off the sense of Allison Cryer’s tenure there, and with it, all that through countless generations had felt safe and warm.

Some people come into the world

As if down a bright green path,

In short sleeves and summer dress,

Looking straight ahead.

And some people come into the world

As if down a rain-dark alleyway,

Crouched beneath a black umbrella,

Glancing fearfully behind.

The poem was as she had described it, only a few lines, but as I read it again, and then a third time, I felt its sense of dread as if it had been whispered into my ear rather than written out and handed to me on a small sheet of plain white paper. There was something mysterious in its message, something hinted at but otherwise concealed, and thinking literally—which was the only way I could think in those days—I wanted to know about the “rain-dark alleyway” she’d written of, and which I immediately pictured in all its grim urban detail. Something had happened to Kelli Troy, I felt sure, something she had narrowly survived, and which had given her a sense of vulnerability that was darker and more mysterious than the common fears of other people. More than anything, her poem had made her seem less remote, and in that way approachable.

And so I approached her the very next day. She was standing with Sheila Cameron, who was the undisputed leader of the Turtle Grove crowd, that group of teenage girls who lived in Turtle Grove, Choctaw’s only wealthy section.

“Hi, Ben,” Sheila said as I walked up to them. Her voice was more of a chirp, bright and friendly, and her face was as open as her manner. She was not the vain monster she might have been, considering her looks and her father’s money and the fact that she was dating a “college man.” Her face seemed fixed in a cheerful smile. It is not at all the face I now occasionally glimpse ahead of me in a grocery line, hidden behind dark glasses, its brittle features frozen in a mask of profound dismay.

“Hi, Sheila,” I said, then looked at Kelli. “Can I talk to you a minute?” I asked her, indicating that I wanted to speak to her in private.

We walked a few feet down the hall and stopped.

“I read your poem,” I told her immediately. “I liked it a lot.”

Kelli smiled quietly, her dark eyes still. “I wrote a few things at my old school,” she said.

It seemed a perfect opportunity to declare my singularity. “You came from Baltimore, right? I heard you say that in class.”

“Yes.”

“That must have been great, living up there. I mean, compared to Choctaw, which is so small.” I shrugged. “Boring, too. I can’t wait to get out.”

She regarded me silently for a moment, adding nothing until she finally straightened herself slightly and said, “Well, I better get to class.”

“Yeah, me, too,” I said. “But, listen, if you ever have something else, something you’ve written, I’d really like to see it.”

“Okay,” Kelli said. And with that, she was gone.

After school, as I made my way outside, Luke came up beside me and gave me a friendly punch on the arm. “I heard you were having a little heart-to-heart with Kelli Troy,” he said playfully.

I looked at him sternly. “Sheila Cameron has a big mouth.”

“So what were you talking to Kelli about?” Luke asked.

“Just something she wrote for the Wildcat,” I answered, speeding up slightly, as if I could get away from him that way.

We continued on, past the long line of yellow buses that stretched the length of the school’s driveway. At the end of the driveway, Luke dropped away. “I told Betty Ann I’d meet her outside the gym,” he said.

My father had turned the ’57 Chevy over to me the week before. It sat in a patch of shade at the far end of the lot. Eddie Smathers had parked his bright red Ford Fairlane next to it, and I could see Eddie and a few other boys as they idled not far away, smoking cigarettes and kicking lazily at the gravel earth.

One of them was Lyle Gates, and as I walked past, heading directly for my car, he glanced at me and waved.

“Ben, right?” he asked.

I stopped and turned toward him. “Yeah.”

“Ben Wade,” Gates said with a short, self-congratulatory laugh. “I never forget a name. You and Luke Duchamp were at Cuffy’s a few weeks back.” A cigarette dangled easily from the corner of his mouth. “So, you been gettin’ any?” he asked.

I didn’t answer, which was an answer in itself.

Lyle grinned. “Oh, don’t worry about it. You’ll get married one day, and then you’ll be getting way too much. More than you want. Wearing it out.”

The other boys laughed. One of them blew a smoke ring into the clear late-afternoon air.

“I don’t think I could ever get enough,” Eddie Smathers squealed.

Lyle paid no attention to him. His gaze drifted up toward the school. “Old Man Avery will be looking down here pretty soon,” he said. “He’ll spot me and think, ‘Well, there’s Lyle Gates. What’s that troublemaking asshole up to?’ ”

Eddie laughed. “Hell, that’s better than him thinking you’re a pussy, right?”

Lyle shrugged. His eyes swept up toward the front of the school, the line of buses parked in front of it. “Well, seems like nothing much has changed around good old Choctaw High,” he said, his voice weary, bored, but glancing about nervously nonetheless, as if he were unable to settle on a fixed point.

“Well, we got a new girl,” Eddie chimed in quickly. “From up north.”

Lyle tossed his cigarette out into the lot, then lit another. “From up north, you said?”

Eddie nodded. “That’s right. She’s good-looking, too.”

Lyle grinned. “Shit, Eddie, you know I wouldn’t fuck a Yankee,” he said with a quick boyish wink.

Eddie’s eyes sparkled lustily. “You would this one.” He made an hourglass motion with his arms, then wiped his brow. “Whooee, she’s nice!”

Lyle drew in a deep breath, then let it out slowly. His shoulders fell slightly, as if a heavy weight had suddenly been lowered upon them. I could see a small purple tattoo on his upper arm, the figure of a woman, and underneath it, the name of the wife who’d already cast him off.

“Got to go,” he said. Then he walked away, a curl of white smoke trailing behind him, and disappeared into his car.

“I didn’t know you hung out with Lyle,” I said to Eddie.

Eddie shrugged. “Shit, I don’t hang out with him. We just shoot a game down at the pool hall once in a while.”

I glanced back toward Lyle. He sat silently in his car, his eyes lingering on the school with a forlorn wistfulness that seemed odd in one so young.

“What’s he doing here, anyway?” I asked.

“Just checking things out, I guess.” Eddie took a final draw on his cigarette, then tossed it to the ground. “You seen Todd?”

“No.”

He lifted himself from the hood of the car, his feet sinking into the gravel with a soft crunch. “I hope he didn’t leave without me,” he said worriedly. He glanced around for a moment, as if trying to formulate a plan. Then he darted quickly out of the lot and up the cement walkway that led to the entrance of the school.

Watching him go, I could not have imagined that much would ever become of him, but Eddie is a successful local mill owner now, and there is talk that he will run for mayor. Each time we meet at the hospital or at a football game or sometimes while shopping at the new mall, he stops to pump my hand vigorously, in politician style, though with him it seems less false. He flashes his customary smile. “Remember when we were kids at Choctaw High?” he always asks. He shakes his head playfully, remembering a time of life that no doubt always returns to him with an air of uncomplicated joy. “Remember all the fun we had?”

“I remember,” I tell him.

The smile broadens until it seems to cover his entire face, and a great cheerfulness sparkles in his eyes. “Boy, those were great days, weren’t they, Ben?” he says.

And as he says it, I see him as he was that night, a boy of seventeen again, his reddish hair glowing with a diabolical sheen, his green eyes trained on the grim severity of my face, his voice coming toward me through the smoldering summer darkness, tense and edgy. What are you saying, Ben?