Breakheart Hill

CHAPTER 6

SOMETIMES, IT BEGINS AT THE VERY END, AND I AM WALKING across a broad green lawn. I can see Luke beside me, his face in profile as it moves in tandem with mine, like two horses harnessed together by a dark leather strap. Together, we bear our burden to the appointed spot, then watch as it is eased downward into the red, clay earth that makes up the Choctaw Valley. The casket is a pale gray, and because of that, it seems to dissolve into the earth, vanish, as if it were a mist. Luke stands beside me, his hands folded in front of him. His eyes are not moist, and he does not speak, but I can see the tension in his fingers, the way they grip and release, grip and release.

I glance around at the people who have joined us at the grave site. Sheila Cameron stands like a pillar of black stone, and not far from her, Eddie Smathers is dressed inappropriately in a light blue summer suit.

Miss Troy stands directly in front of me, and when it is over, she steps to the very edge of the grave and tosses a single white rose onto the gray casket below her. Then she makes her way over to Luke and me, takes each of us by the hand and squeezes fiercely. “Kelli loved you boys,” she says.

I stare at her, amazed by the force of life that still surges from her, the enormous reserves of strength and courage I can see in her eyes and feel in the fiery grip of her hand, and in that instant, the full force of what was lost sweeps over me like a boiling wave.

At other times it returns to me on no specific memory. I rise from my bed and walk out into the field behind my house. The fields are plush or barren, alive with seedlings or crackling with already withered corn. In that world everything appears perfectly calibrated, with nothing left to chance. Above, the sky remains changeless, the stars like silver pegs firmly nailed into the darkness, the planets circling in their iron rings, theirs the gift of fixedness, ours the gift of flux, they without will, we without direction.

Once, not long ago, my daughter Amy came out after me.

“You should get some help,” she said.

“For what?”

“The insomnia.”

“It happens only once in a while,” I told her. “It’s nothing to worry about.”

“But it makes you tired. Irritable, too, sometimes.”

The face of Mary Diehl swam into my mind, her eyes raw and sleepless, glazed in fear, her voice a breathless whimper: Please don’t tell anybody, Ben.

I looked at Amy. “Be careful,” I told her.

She stared at me quizzically, unable to follow so abrupt a command. “Careful?” she asked. “About what?”

I shook my head, unable to answer her or even guess where I might begin an answer.

“In everything,” I said with a quick shrug.

She continued to watch me closely, worriedly. “Are you okay, Dad?”

“I’m fine,” I assured her. Then I drew her under my arm and we stood together for a long time, the night wind shifting frantically to and fro around us like a hunting dog working desperately to pick up some vanished trail.

After a time, we returned to the house. Amy went back to her bedroom, but I knew I still couldn’t sleep, so I went to my office instead of going upstairs. I sat behind my desk, then swiveled around to face the large bay window that looks out toward the mountain. It was a deep fall night, but I could feel a wave of heat pass over me, as if, behind the black curtain, the sun had taken a single menacing step toward me. For a long time I remained in place, silent, almost immobile, like a naked man locked in a furiously steaming room, waiting patiently, as if for some unknowable next move.

The wave passed after a few minutes, leaving me in the throes of so penetrating an exhaustion that I felt as if every muscle within me had been exercised to its limit. I drew in a long, restorative breath, and felt the slow recuperation begin again, a cyclical process that has continued through the years, and which as it goes forward always leaves some part of me behind, a portion of my suit of armor rusting in the field.

And suddenly I was young again. All of us were young. I saw us splashing about in the nearby river, Luke swinging from a rope that dangled over the nearly motionless water while Betty Ann clapped loudly from the adjoining bank. I saw Todd carried off the playing field upon the shoulders of his teammates, Mary watching breathlessly from the wooden bleachers a few yards away. A hundred separate scenes flashed through my mind: Eddie hungering after Todd’s attention, eager to follow his every command, Sheila chatting happily about the college man she would later marry, a circle of admiring girls gathered around her, listening enviously. I saw Luke and Betty Ann stealing kisses in the dark space behind the front stairs, eyes open, glancing about for some patrolling teacher they feared might spot them there. And though I understood that what we had not known of life at that time could have filled a thousand volumes, it still seemed good that we had known so little, that for a brief hour we had lived in the grip of nothing more threatening than the coming dawn. Then suddenly I saw Kelli, her face wreathed in the same trouble Luke had glimpsed that day as he’d driven her up toward Breakheart Hill. I saw everything that had led up to that moment, and everything that had followed from it. And I thought, No, youth is more illusion than we need.

THE FIRST ISSUE OF THE WILDCAT WAS PUBLISHED ONLY A week or so after Kelli handed me her poem. In appearance it was almost identical to the paper Allison Cryer had headed during the preceding two years, the same crude drawing of a growling wildcat festooned across the top of the page, the Alabama state motto, Audemos ius defendere, “We Dare Defend Our Rights,” inscribed on an equally crude banner at its paws.

The content was pretty much the same as well, except for Kelli’s poem. It was on the third page of the paper, nestled between a sports story and a “blind item” gossip column which a girl named Louise Davenport had volunteered to provide for each issue.

I remember being somewhat excited when the first issue arrived from the local printer, and I know that the only reason for that excitement was the fact that Kelli’s poem was in it. It was not only the first poem ever printed in the Wildcat, it was also, as I had no doubt, the most interesting thing that had ever been in it.

Because of that, I expected the verses to create a little stir at Choctaw High, bringing attention both to Kelli, as the poem’s author, and to me, as the paper’s innovative new editor.

In fact, nothing at all happened. The paper arrived and was distributed. For the next two days I would see students perusing it idly as they sat on the steps or leaned against their lockers, and each time I would look to see if they were reading Kelli’s poem. They never were. Even Luke never read it, or at least not until I shoved it under his nose and forced him to, and after which he merely handed the paper back to me with a quick “Yeah, that’s nice.”

Kelli also seemed to take the poem’s publication without excitement. The day after the paper was distributed, she came up to me in the hall, thanked me politely for including it, then quickly darted up the central stairs to her next class.

A week passed, and during that time I waited for some reaction, but beyond Luke’s “nice” and Kelli’s hurried “thank you,” there was nothing.

Then, late one afternoon, I turned from my small table in the Wildcat office and saw Miss Carver standing in the door, a copy of the issue in her hand.

“I read Kelli Troy’s poem in the Wildcat,” she said. “The rest of the issue …”

“Doesn’t live up to it,” I said, finishing what I knew to be her thought.

“But maybe it could,” Miss Carver said, nodding. She stepped inside the office. “I’ve already talked to Kelli, and she’s willing to take a more active interest in the paper.” She stopped again, cautious, as if she feared offending me. “I think you two might make a good team,” she concluded.

I said nothing.

“As coeditors, I mean,” Miss Carver added.

She appeared to expect me to resist the idea, perhaps even be offended by it in some way, but I leaped to it instead.

“Well, just tell her to come down here as soon as she gets a chance,” I said.

Kelli came the next afternoon, pausing at the door a moment, just as she had the first time, then uttering her quick “Hi.”

I stood up and walked out into the corridor, the two of us facing each other in the deserted hallway.

“Miss Carver said you were interested in working with me on the Wildcat. I think that’s great. You could add something to it, you know? Something different.”

She smiled for the first time, genuinely smiled, as if she found me amusing.

“Something new,” I sputtered. “Like a perspective. On Choctaw, I mean. A different point of view. Northern.”

Something in what I’d said seemed to strike her. She studied me silently, as if trying to decide if I could be taken seriously. Then she appeared to reach some sort of conclusion. “Do you have a car?” she asked.

“Just an old Chevy,” I told her, “but it runs okay.”

“Do you have time to take a drive?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay,” Kelli said. “I’ll show you something that might be interesting.”

I felt the whole school watching as Kelli and I made our way down the long walkway and headed into the parking lot. That was not the case, of course, although I did see Eddie Smathers do a double take when he glimpsed us, his eyes following us until we disappeared into the old gray Chevy.

“Where are we going?” I asked as I hit the ignition.

“All the way out of town,” Kelli said. “Turn right on Main Street.”

I did as she told me, guiding the car down the street that led directly from the school to the center of Choctaw, then to the right and along a wide boulevard bordered first by dime stores and clothing shops, then by filling stations and used-car lots and eventually by nothing but fields and scattered farmhouses, the town disappearing behind us.

“There’s a place out here,” Kelli said, her eyes now much more intense as she scanned the broad flat land that spread out to the right until it finally lifted toward the mountain. “It’s in the woods, off an unpaved road.”

“We call them dirt roads down here,” I told her cautiously. “I think I know the one you mean.”

We turned onto it a few minutes later, a strip of dry road that moved like a red scar through the pastureland on either side. A film of orange dust had gathered on my glasses by the time we stopped at the end of it. I pulled a handkerchief from my pocket and began to wipe them.

“What are we looking for?” I asked as I put them on again.

“A big rock.” Kelli was peering into the deep woods that rose at the edge of the mountain. “It must be up there somewhere.”

She got out of the car and stared out toward the base of the mountain. “There’s the small stream I read about,” she said, pointing to a narrow trench that cut its way in a crooked pattern from the mountain to the distant road.

I risked a smile. “We call them creeks down here,” I said.

Kelli smiled back, then turned and walked around to the front of the car. I joined her there, watching as she scanned the distant slopes. “It must be just beyond that group of trees,” she said as she started up the road.

I followed behind her, my eyes fixed on the flowing shape of her body as it moved ahead of me, the sway of her hips beneath the dark skirt, the soft, rhythmic seesaw of her shoulders as she made her way toward the end of the road, the thick ebony tangle of her hair. Of the landscape that surrounded her, I remember the mountain as a dappled wall of red and orange, the creek as a dark thread, the road as a deep red cut through motionless fields of yellow grass.

She was still ahead of me when she reached the end of the road. She turned and waited, smiling slightly, a single curl of hair over her right eye.

“It’s over there,” she said when I came up to her. She pointed first to a small clearing, then beyond it to a large granite boulder. “That’s where she hid,” she said.

“Who?”

“They named her Lillith.”

“Who did?”

“The people who lived near here. Thomas and Mary Brandon.”

She motioned me forward. Together we made our way to the clearing, then to the enormous gray stone that loomed above it.

Kelli pointed to a small pebbly ridge of earth that rose from the base of the stone. The space between the ridge and the stone was no bigger than a fox’s lair, and the years had all but completely filled it in with leaves and twigs.

“This is where she stayed that day,” Kelli told me. “She watched it all from right here.”

She eased herself onto the ridge of earth and leaned back against the stone, her eyes now turned toward the slender blue line of the road we’d driven down.

I started to sit down beside her, but thought better of it. And so I strolled over to the nearest tree and leaned against it.

“I read about it in a book about this part of Alabama,” Kelli said. “It tells all about things that have happened around here.”

“What happened to Lillith?” I asked.

“She died a long time ago, but before she died she told about what had happened to her when she was a little girl. Before the Civil War.”

“We call it the War Between the States,” I told her lightly, feeling somewhat more at ease with her now.

She smiled again. “Well, this was a long time before the War Between the States,” she said. She pointed to the north, farther down the valley. “There was a Cherokee village about three miles from here, and that’s where Lillith lived. She’d forgotten her Indian name by the time she told her story, but she could remember a lot about how she’d lived.”

That life, as Kelli went on to describe it, had been peaceful enough. The Cherokee had been farmers, and they had lived in an agrarian style that had not been terribly different from the white farmers who, over the years, had slowly come to surround them. One of those farmers had been Thomas Brandon, and he had become friendly with the tall Cherokee brave Lillith remembered as her father. The two men had “smoked together,” as Lillith had put it, both in the Cherokee lodge and in Brandon’s log cabin at the mouth of a stream she identified as Lewis Creek.

“That stream,” Kelli said, pointing to it.

I glanced down at its slender, nearly motionless flow, and suddenly it seemed to take on the vaguely sinister and tragic aspects of the “rain-dark alleyway” in Kelli’s poem.

“They decided to move the Indians out of this area,” Kelli went on. “All the Indians had to pack up and head west.” Her eyes drifted up the valley to where, it seemed, she could almost see pale lines of smoke still rising from the Cherokee settlement. “So they did,” she said. “Except for Lillith’s father, who refused to be driven from his home.” On the day before the soldiers came, he mounted his horse, pulled Lillith up into his lap and headed out of the village.

“She remembered being scared at first,” Kelli said, “mostly because of the grim look on her father’s face, but after a while she saw that they were headed toward Thomas Brandon’s house.”

Brandon’s cabin was actually in view when her father brought his horse to a stop along the eastern bank of Lewis Creek. Lillith remembered him lowering her down slowly, dismounting himself, then walking her hand in hand to the edge of the water.

“He told her to take a drink from the stream,” Kelli went on. “To do that, she had to get down on her stomach and hang her head over the bank.”

Lillith did as she was told, lying flat in the grass, lapping at the water, until she felt her father’s hand at the back of her head, pressing her face farther down into the water.

“He had decided to drown her rather than let her be taken by the soldiers,” Kelli told me.

Lillith began to struggle, and even in old age, when she told her tale, she remembered the ferocity of her movements, the desperate fight for air, the sounds of splashing water and even the fleeting sight of a green fish as it fluttered by in terror.

It had ended with a sudden, deafening roar, and the sight of her father’s face crashing into the water beside hers, his eyes open, staring, a plume of blood rising from the wound in his head.

“She pulled herself out of the water,” Kelli said, “and saw Thomas Brandon a few yards away. The rifle barrel was still smoking in his hand, she said.” She paused, then added, “Brandon later told her that he’d simply come upon a man trying to kill a child, but that he hadn’t realized it was Lillith and her father.” She shuddered. “The next day the Brandons hid her beside this rock,” she said.

And it was from that small earthen burrow, she added, that Lillith watched the long line of her people as they drifted past her toward the West, hundreds of them, wrapped in blankets, walking, or on horseback, or joggled in wagons, and with no more than a few soldiers as their escort.

Kelli stood up and began lightly slapping bits of forest debris from her skirt. When she’d finished she glanced out over the valley. “I’d better be getting home now,” she said.

We walked back to the car together. The sun was lowering toward the western ridges by then, scattering its fading light over the opposing mountainside and into the yellowing fields that stretched the whole broad length of the valley floor.

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.