Breakheart Hill

CHAPTER 8

LUKE IS NOT THE ONLY ONE WHO REMEMBERS KELLI TROY. Sheila Cameron remembers her, and several years ago, after the small stone memorial was erected on Breakheart Hill, she broke the long silence that had enveloped her since Rosie’s death. We’d not come to the ceremony together, and I had not expected her to approach me. During the speeches that had preceded the unveiling of the memorial, Sheila had stood off by herself, listening silently, almost motionless. Over the past few years, I’d often tried to breach the stony isolation in which she lived, but she’d refused each attempt, though always politely, saying only that she was “not very social.” But on that particular day, something eased its grip on her, and at the end of the ceremony, she stepped alongside me as I made my way up the hill. She’d wrapped herself in a long coat despite the warmth of the day, and her eyes, as always, were hidden behind the dark lenses of her glasses.

“Funny how it all comes back,” she said.

“Yes.”

“I thought you’d be the one to speak about Kelli today.”

I shook my head. “I asked Luke to do it. It would have been hard for me.”

“We lost a lot when we lost her,” Sheila said. “So young.”

She was talking about Kelli, but I knew that she was talking about Rosie, too, and I remembered the moment nearly twenty years before, when I’d drawn that tiny little girl from Sheila’s womb and placed her in her mother’s arms.

We stopped at the top of the ridge, the whole town below us, its chaos of streets and twisted lanes, spires pointing into emptiness.

After a moment, Sheila turned toward me. “You know, Ben, sometimes I think there must be some kind of animal out there. It’s invisible. We can’t see it. But it devours us. It devours our lives.” She waited for me to answer, her eyes still fixed on mine, but when I remained silent, she turned back toward the valley. “But it’s the same everywhere, don’t you guess?” she asked wearily.

I remembered something said long ago. “Every place is the whole world,” I told her, quoting Kelli Troy.

IT SEEMS STRANGE THAT OF ALL THE GIRLS WHO CAME TO know Kelli during her year at Choctaw High, Sheila came closest to being her friend. Certainly it was not a friendship I could have predicted. Sheila was very much a Turtle Grove girl, the only daughter of one of the town’s oldest and richest families. She had always moved in a circle of other Turtle Grove girls, a tight-knit little group that dominated Choctaw High almost completely. They inevitably went to each other’s parties, joined each other’s clubs, stole and discarded each other’s boyfriends and finally trotted off to college together, usually to the same sorority house at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, though an occasional rebel spirit might head south to Auburn instead. Most of them were exactly what their lives had made them, gracious and well mannered, taking their considerable privileges for granted, but polite enough not to hold them over the rest of us. Even so, they were not prone to mingle with the mountain girls, or those from the rural villages that surrounded Choctaw, of which Collier, where Kelli lived, was unmistakably one.

So it struck me as rather strange when Sheila mentioned Kelli to me that morning, jauntily striding up to my locker, her books cradled in her arms.

“Hi, Ben,” she said.

Her smile was very bright, as always, and it, along with her hazel, nearly golden eyes, had dazzled most of the boys of Choctaw High at one time or another.

“Hi, Sheila.”

She leaned against the wall of lockers, almost seductively, as if she were cozying up to them. “I was just thinking about you last night,” she said, then caught the odd sound of that, laughed girlishly and added, “Well, actually, I was thinking about you and Kelli.”

This seemed no less odd to me than her opening statement. “Me and Kelli?” I said with a short laugh. “Why were you thinking about us?”

“Well, I’m planning to have a Christmas party in a few weeks, and I was thinking you and Kelli might want to come.”

I could only repeat dumbly, “Me and Kelli?”

“Well, you two are friends, aren’t you?”

“Yeah.”

“It’s not going to be a house party-type thing,” Sheila went on. “It’s going to be a dance. Sort of formal, like a Christmas prom, with everybody all dressed up.” She waved at a couple of girls as they walked by, then turned back to me. “I’m having it at the Turtle Grove Country Club. So, the way I want it, it’s no stags, you know. Just couples.”

I shook my head. “I don’t know if you’d call Kelli and me a—”

Sheila laughed and waved her hand. “I don’t mean it has to be like that, Ben. But just two people, together. No stags. You know, so that everybody has a dance partner.” She looked at me a moment, as if trying to find another way to explain it. “I mean, so when the dancing starts, nobody’s left out,” she added finally.

I turned toward my locker and needlessly began fiddling with the books and papers I’d crammed inside. “Have you talked to Kelli about this?”

Sheila shook her head. “No, I wanted to talk to you first.”

“Well, Kelli might want to bring somebody else,” I told her.

“I don’t think so,” she said. “I think she scares the other boys off. Being new, you know, and from up north. And some of the things she writes in the Wildcat. Sort of brainy. I think it keeps a lot of them back.” She tossed her head airily. “They’ll come around eventually, of course,” she said, “but for right now, they’re sort of keeping their distance.”

I instantly recalled Luke’s warning that Kelli wouldn’t be “new” for long, and that if I were interested in her, I needed to act right away. It seemed to me that Sheila’s Christmas party offered the perfect opportunity to do just that.

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll talk to Kelli about it.”

“Great,” Sheila said happily, her smile still in place, a feature that, at the time, seemed so fixed and unchangeable, so much the permanent product of an innocent and kindly nature, that I could not imagine her face without it.

I SPOKE TO KELLI THAT SAME DAY. WE’D BEGUN TO SIT NEXT to each other in English class, by then, sometimes chatting quietly before class began, and later exchanging occasional glances as Miss Carver described in oddly haunting terms the “tormented” combination of love and hatred that Heathcliff had felt for Catherine Earnshaw. At certain moments, Miss Carver seemed personally shaken by the dark clouds that had swept over that distant moor. In soft, faintly grieving tones, she spoke of passion and tragedy as if they were an inevitable part of life’s unknowable weave, the thread of one inseparably entwined with the other, each generation bearing anew its legacy of loss and ruin.

By that time, too, Kelli and Miss Carver had begun to linger in the room when class was over, Kelli to ask questions or make some comment she had preferred not to make during class, Miss Carver to elaborate, at a deeper level, some point she had purposely simplified for the other students. Occasionally I would also remain behind, listening as the two of them talked about a book in a way that I, as a science student, never talked about one, but which at last made me understand that certain books did not express things simply and directly, but from an angle and mysteriously, because the things they described were themselves inexact, and in part unknowable, and so could not be spoken of in terms of weights and measures, predictable actions and reactions.

On that particular December morning, however, Kelli did not remain in the classroom, but headed directly into the hallway. She was almost at the stairs before I reached her.

“Kelli,” I called to her as I came up from behind.

She stopped and turned toward me.

“Listen, Sheila Cameron came up to me this morning,” I told her. “She said she was planning on having a Christmas party in a couple of weeks. Sort of a semiformal-type thing. She’s having it at the Turtle Grove Country Club.”

Kelli watched me expressionlessly.

“It’s sort of a dance,” I added, now growing more nervous under the gaze of Kelli’s motionless black eyes. “It’s just for couples. You know, so everyone will have a partner.” I hesitated, then bit the bullet. “She thought that you and I might want to come.”

Kelli smiled. “Okay,” she said lightly.

She had accepted too quickly, so I wanted to make sure she understood what I was getting at. “I mean the two of us,” I added pointedly. “Together.”

“I know what you meant,” she said. Then she gave me a quick smile, turned breezily and trotted down the stairs.

Luke was delighted when I told him later that afternoon.

“That’s great,” he said happily. “We can all go together. You, me, Betty Ann and Kelli.”

As it turned out, we did exactly that. It was the night of December twenty-second, and though a cold winter rain had been predicted, it was clear and brisk, the moon so bright that its light actually outlined the high mountain ridges that loomed in the distance.

Luke selected a huge late-model Lincoln from his father’s used-car lot, picked up first Betty Ann, then me, and finally drove us all out to Collier to pick up Kelli.

“This thing’s got great speakers,” Luke said proudly, then rattled off the car’s other features. “It’s got AC, dual-reclining seats, genuine velour upholstery, adjustable leg room—”

“Enough, Luke,” Betty Ann said sharply. “I’m not going to buy the damn thing.” She glanced back at me. “Are you, Ben?”

I shook my head.

We headed on toward Kelli’s house, and as we neared it I could feel myself growing more and more nervous. I adjusted my tie, wiped my glasses, checked my fly, my jacket handkerchief, the shine on my shoes.

“I was really surprised when Sheila invited me to this thing,” I said.

“Well, I don’t think it was really you that was invited, Ben,” Luke said with a playful wink. “I think it was Kelli that was invited.” He glanced at Betty Ann. “In case you haven’t heard, Ben’s just the fly on the chariot wheel as far as this party goes.”

Betty Ann tossed her head back and laughed. She was a large, red-haired girl, the type who always sits in the shade and whose skin, in summer, is perpetually pink. She was quick to laugh, particularly at Luke, with whom she has lived now for nearly three decades. She is considerably larger now, a fad dieter with a gently rounded double chin, and middle age has robbed some of the dazzling highlights from her hair, but of all the people of my youth, I think that Betty Ann has built the strongest life. She owns a store in the sleek new mall, stocks its fancy mirrored shelves with what she jokingly calls “southern objets d’art” and at the end of each working day returns to Luke and the last of their three sons, the other two having already left for college.

I saw her again only a few weeks ago, while doing my Christmas shopping in the mall. She was dressed to fit the season, in a bright red skirt and blouse, with a holly-green sash wrapped around her waist. “If Santa Claus were a woman,” she said, twirling around slowly to show off her outfit, “he’d look just like me.”

I had come in to buy a few presents for some of the people at the hospital, a practice I began after Dr. McCoy died, and of which, I am sure, he would have disapproved.

“It looks like we might have a white Christmas this year,” Betty Ann said as she completed her turn and came up to me.

“So they say.”

“It’s been a long time since that happened.” She thought a moment. “Eight or nine years ago, right?”

“Yes,” I said. “At least that long.”

“Jimmy was still a little thing, remember? So was your Amy.”

I nodded.

“We took them sledding.”

I remember that day very well. The mountain had been a wall of white, and Luke had driven all of us up the mountain road, past the recently abandoned high school, to where we’d huddled together in the ankle-deep snow and watched our children sled gleefully down the more gentle upper slope of Breakheart Hill. Luke had stood with Betty Ann beneath his arm, and I with Noreen nestled at my side, the four of us chatting quietly under a crackling skeletal roof of frozen limbs.

After a time the children had exhausted themselves, and we’d all trudged back toward the car, Noreen and Betty Ann walking a little ways behind Luke and me.

“You know, all of us being in the car together on the way up here,” Luke said, “it reminded me of that night we all went to Sheila Cameron’s party in Turtle Grove. Except, of course, that was with—” He stopped, then lowered his voice and continued hastily and self-consciously, as if he’d unexpectedly stumbled upon a grim association and was rushing to get through it. “Well, that was with Kelli, you know,” he said.

I glanced back and almost saw her as she might have been that snow-white afternoon, a handsome woman walking in a dark coat beside Betty Ann Duchamp, her face older now, with lines at her eyes, her voice a bit more southern in its rounded O’s and A’s, but her dark hair still falling to her shoulders, with the same checked scarf wrapped around her throat, though now with a little girl tugging at her hand, one no less likely to have been called Amy.

Luke said nothing else as we made our way to the car. It was a big station wagon, and Luke had fitted its tires with the snow chains necessary to get us up the mountain road.

“He’s been waiting for fifteen years to use these snow chains,” Betty Ann joked as Luke edged the car back onto the road and we began our descent into Choctaw.

Luke laughed at the remark, but I could see that the old questions had returned to him, and I believe that it was from that particular moment, as we’d slogged our way up the snowy slopes of Breakheart Hill, that he began purposefully to revisit the single event that had most marked his youth, confronting the doubts that still plagued him, and that from then on, he used the party at Turtle Grove as the point of embarkation for his journey into the past.

Kelli was ready for us when we got to her house that December night, but I could not have been prepared for the sight that greeted me, a beautiful girl in a long red coat, sweeping down a short expanse of stairs, then rushing through a great darkness to arrive breathlessly at my side.

“I thought you’d forgotten me,” she said.

I smiled, and then, wholly without knowing it, uttered a promise I have not failed to keep. “Never,” I said.

TURTLE GROVE IS A PART OF EVERY TOWN. IT LIES FOREVER on the outskirts, beyond the range of sirens and factory whistles. The lawns are always greener and more carefully tended. The trees are larger, more spacious, and in summer they cast the lawns in a cooler, deeper shade. Always, and more than anything, there is room to expand.

Luke and Betty Ann live in Turtle Grove now, and although I still live within the town limits of Choctaw, I long ago joined the Turtle Grove Country Club, a move that Dr. McCoy, whose practice I took over, absolutely insisted upon for professional reasons. “You’ll need paying customers, Ben,” he told me firmly, “just the same as if you ran a grocery store.”

In the fall, when the first cool descends upon the valley, Luke and I sometimes play a round of golf on the club’s gently rolling course. Several years ago, we came upon Todd Jeffries, as he lay facedown, passed out and looking like a beached walrus as he wallowed unconsciously in the sand, the crotch of his lime-green pants darkly soaked with his own urine. Luke shook his head despairingly. “My Lord, what will ever become of him,” he said.

Certainly one could not have predicted such a sight when, on that clear December night so many years before, Todd had met us at the club’s broad double doors, opening them to their full width. “Sheila’s got me playing the butler tonight,” he said with his usual welcoming smile.

Mary Diehl was on his arm, as beautiful as she would ever be, her eyes sparkling, her long dark hair flowing down her back. “Hi, everybody,” she said cheerfully.

We all said hi, then walked past the two of them and into a hall that Sheila and her Turtle Grove companions had transformed into a glittering palace. There were colored lights everywhere, hanging from the picture molding, spiraling up the tall wooden columns, dangling from the banisters of the curving central staircase.

Even Kelli, who I assumed to have previously seen a great many grand interiors, appeared impressed.

“Beautiful,” she whispered almost to herself. Then she turned to me. “Beautiful, don’t you think, Ben?”

I nodded silently, still unwilling to give the Turtle Grove crowd their due, but finally giving it anyway, albeit grudgingly. “They really know how to do this kind of thing,” I said.

She swept ahead of me, tugging me along behind her, her fingers pulling at my jacket. I pretended reluctance, as if, bored worldling that I was, such things no longer dazzled me.

But I was dazzled. I was dazzled by the club itself, the sumptuousness of its decorations, the hundreds of lights and scores of holly wreaths and potted poinsettias that had turned its stately plantation-style interior into the closest thing I had ever seen to a wonderland. But even more, I was dazzled by the way dark suits and sleek semiformal dresses had transported the awkward and untested teenage boys and girls I saw each day in the halls of Choctaw High to the borders of a grave adulthood. They’d gathered themselves together in small groups that evening, these young men and women who talked quietly and sipped punch as reservedly as they would later sip bourbon. Standing in their midst, I saw Choctaw’s next ruling generation make its opening bow, its future lawyers and bankers and businessmen, its coming mayors and councilmen, the faces that would oversee its chamber of commerce, and guide through incalculably troubled times its board of education. It would never have occurred to them, as I told Kelli later that same evening, to do anything other than what they’d been born to do, govern a small valley town with what they took to be a princely grace and wisdom.

Her response surprised me. “Is that bad?” she asked.

She’d just finished doing a turn on the dance floor with Luke, and a final twirl had flung a single curl across her forehead. She’d pushed it back into place as she’d spoken, then tossed her head lightly before adding, “You seem to think that’s a bad thing.”

“Well, you’d think that with all the money they have, they’d want to see the world a little,” I said peevishly. “Not just settle down here in Choctaw, which is what all of them will do.”

Her eyes were shining. “Maybe they’re not that interested in the rest of the world.”

I shook my head. “It’s just because you’ve lived in a big city, Kelli, that’s why you think these people are so great.”

“I don’t think they’re great.”

“Nice, basically,” I continued. “Quaint.”

She looked at me. “Why do you hate them so much, Ben?” she asked. “What did they do to you?”

“Nothing to me, personally,” I told her. “But I hate what they do to themselves, what they settle for.”

She turned away and stared out at the dance floor. I could tell that she disagreed with me, but had chosen not to argue the point. “Look at Luke go,” she said after a moment.

After a series of ballads, the band had suddenly veered into a full-scale rock and roll rhythm, and Luke and Betty Ann, along with almost everyone else, were gyrating wildly on the dance floor.

“That’s more what I’m used to,” Kelli said. “That’s the way we danced in Baltimore.” She turned to me. “You haven’t asked me yet.”

I shrugged.

“Don’t you ever dance?” Kelli asked.

I smiled and allowed myself a moment of self-mockery. “Of course not,” I said as if offended by her question. “Haven’t you noticed? I’m much too serious for stuff like that.”

She took my hand. “No, you’re not,” she said jokingly as she pulled me from my chair.

We danced quite a few times after that, and I think that Kelli was surprised at how good I was at using the flashy little steps Luke had taught me only a few days before, but which, on that crowded, dimly lighted dance floor, must have appeared completely spontaneous and improvised.

But I was not the only boy she danced with that night. Eddie Smathers asked her to the floor, and Chuck Wheelwright, who later went to the state senate, and Wilkie Billings, whom I’ve treated for quite a few ailments since then but who now appears to be doing fine, and Randy Wilcox, who died at Khe Sanh.

And yet, to use the title of the song that brought the party to an end that night, Kelli did save the last dance for me.

We were both quite tired by the time they played it, a slow, mournful ballad, as all last dances were in those days, and during which, for a few delicious moments, I held her very close to me, felt her breath at my ear.

On the way to the car, I drew Luke nearer to me.

“Drop Kelli and me off at my house,” I whispered. “I want to take her home myself.”

“Things must have gone pretty well,” Luke said with a sly smile.

“I just want to be alone with her,” I explained.

Luke did as I asked, using the fact that he had to get Betty Ann home before her curfew as a pretext, and so, shortly after the last dance, Kelli and I were in my old Chevy, headed toward Collier.

I had never seen her look happier, and just before she stepped out of the car and headed for her front door, I found out why.

“You know, for the first time I don’t feel like the new girl in school,” she said.

“I’m glad.”

She looked at me hesitantly, as if considering whether she should say more. “At first I was afraid that I wouldn’t like it here,” she said softly. “Coming from a big city, you know, and moving to a small town.”

I gave her my best sardonic smile. “Well, I guess Choctaw has its charms.”

“It’s taught me something,” Kelli said.

I could not imagine life in Choctaw teaching anybody anything.

“It’s taught me that basically every place has the whole world in it,” Kelli said. “Everything that happens happens everywhere.” She thought a moment longer, then added, “But maybe in a small place, a slower place, you can see it better.”

Suddenly Choctaw was as romantic a place as had ever been, or ever would be, and I knew for a certainty that it was Kelli who made it so. I felt a great yearning rush through me, wash over me like a wildly tumbling waterfall, and I knew then that Luke had been right some weeks before, that this was what it was to be in love.

She reached over and gave my hand a quick, affectionate squeeze. “See you in school,” she said. She started to get out of the car, stopped, quickly opened her purse, pulled out a sheet of paper and handed it to me.

“Something for the next issue,” she told me, “if you think it’s any good.”

I took the paper from her, then watched her swiftly cross the short distance from the car and disappear into her house. But I lingered in her driveway, unable to leave. I wanted to be in the same darkness she was in, feel the same tingling chill, hear the same breeze as it swept along the fields behind her house. In the car alone, watching her home for those few seconds before I pulled out of the driveway, I felt the exquisite agony both of her nearness and her distance, and I can say now, after the passage of three decades, that it was the most delicious torment I have ever felt, the single, searing instant when, in all my life, I was most fully alive.

The lights were still burning inside her house when I finally forced myself to pull out of the driveway and return home. As a drive, it seemed very long, as if I were moving through a steadily thickening darkness, rich but also frightening, since I realized that Kelli was the only person I’d ever felt this way about, the one person I could not leave behind.

Once at home, as I had done before, I took what she’d given me and read it:

I am the holder of lost claims.

As years go by, what still remains,

Echoed words, departed friends,

The common means to common ends.

The place that you are free to borrow

While your today becomes tomorrow.

I am a monument to the slain,

A tennis court, a lover’s lane,

A sloping hill, a gabled school,

A golden day, a golden rule,

The patch of earth our fathers gave

For flowers and our common grave.

I am a town.

When I think of it now, it strikes me as odd that the poem didn’t alarm me in the way it demonstrated Kelli’s attitude toward Choctaw, how at home she had begun to feel within what I had always taken to be its pinched and arid world. And yet, it didn’t. I didn’t feel that I was losing her when I read it, that she was “going over to the other side,” or even that she had been unconsciously seduced by small-town life. Just the opposite, in fact, so that for the first time, I began to think that living with her in Choctaw, being married to her, having children and growing old with her, all of it in Choctaw, that this was the life I really wanted. I would still go to medical school, but after that, I could return to Choctaw, set up a small practice, become the beloved village doctor. I was able to envision the quiet honor that would accompany such a life, its daily pleasures and rewards, with Kelli always at my side.

I suppose it was at that point that I actually began to direct my efforts toward winning Kelli Troy, marrying her, making a life with her in Choctaw. I don’t know what methods I considered using for accomplishing that goal, but I do remember that over the next few months the notion of one day marrying her grew steadily in my mind, that at some point it took a conspiratorial direction, and after that, one might almost say that it metastasized into a full-fledged plot.

And it is as a plot that I have continued to think of it during all the time that has passed since then.

Some years ago, when Amy was still quite young, I bought a small cabin on the rim of the mountain. In the late afternoon, she often played in the front yard while I stretched out in the hammock I’d hung on the front porch. Lying on my back one evening, I watched a spider spin its web in the far corner of that same porch. Gracefully, its long slender legs wove a perfect and nearly invisible conspiracy of space and fiber. It struck me that here was a creature that lived almost exclusively by entrapment, that much of nature lived by the same grim but irreducible principle, and that perhaps at base, so did man.

I said as much to Luke a week or so later as we sat together one evening while our children played in the yard only a few feet away. Luke cast his eyes out over the valley, then shook his head. “That leaves out accident,” he said. “It leaves out the fact that sometimes things just happen on the spot.”

“Maybe things don’t happen on the spot as much as we think they do,” I answered.

Luke’s soft blue eyes settled on the steep ridge that had turned nearly purple in the evening shade. I could see that something had suddenly darkened his mood, and that he was fighting to put it into words.

Unaware of the turn his mind had taken, I tried to help him with another quick remark. “Maybe accidents don’t play such a great role in life.”

Suddenly, his eyes shot over to me, fiery in their intensity, as if someone had lit a fuse in his brain. “Then what about Kelli Troy?” he asked in a voice that was unexpectedly demanding. “What about Lyle Gates? I mean, the way they happened to be on Breakheart Hill that day.”

I instantly recalled Lyle as he’d taken the stand on the last day of the trial, how he’d claimed to have seen Kelli as she’d passed by in Luke’s truck, then a few minutes later heard a low moan as he’d reached the upper slope of Breakheart Hill, but that he had not followed her there, nor done her any harm.

“He had some evidence to back him up,” Luke added. “I mean, his car had been repossessed the week before, just like he said in court. So it probably was an accident that he was walking up the mountain in the first place.”

“Maybe.”

“And if Lyle hadn’t been walking up the mountain,” Luke went on, “he wouldn’t have seen Kelli at all that day. And if he hadn’t caught sight of her, well, then—” He stopped, thought a moment, then added, “That always bothered me, the way even Mr. Bailey had to admit that Lyle hadn’t planned it.

“And the way Lyle looked when he took the stand,” Luke said when I didn’t respond, his voice now more urgent than I had ever heard it, as if his memory were a knife point pressing him forward relentlessly. “Remember that, Ben? Remember how Lyle looked?”

I remembered very well. He’d seemed oddly small, like a child in a man’s suit, a baffled look on his face, as if he’d suddenly found himself in a world whose colors and dimensions were absolutely foreign to him. Even his voice had seemed soft and childlike as he’d described what had happened that day, the way he’d found Kelli lying facedown in the vines. She’d been trying to say something, he’d told the court, repeating a single phrase again and again, like a chant. He’d bent down to listen more closely, bent down to hear the last words that came from her: Not you.

“The story never made sense to me,” Luke said, suddenly drawing himself back, as if from a point of no return, but with his eyes still leveled motionlessly on mine. “Did it to you, Ben?”

I heard his question clearly, but I couldn’t answer it then.

Now I can.