Breakheart Hill

CHAPTER 9

WINTERS IN THE SOUTH ARE BLEAK, AND NOT LONG AFTER Sheila Cameron’s Christmas party, winter settled in upon Choctaw with a raw and unforgiving earnestness. During that time, the town seemed like nothing so much as a small ship reluctantly at rest in its winter port, bobbing in the occasional wave, swept by the occasional wind, but otherwise motionless and dormant.

As usual, there were cold rains that winter, and they often turned to sleet, though rarely to snow. Tiny streams trickled from the metal awnings of the dry goods and jewelry shops that lined the town’s main street, and the cardboard political notices and advertisements that had been stapled to the wooden telephone poles grew sodden and began to peel away.

Except for the pines, the trees were bare, and the creeks and ponds, often frozen over, seemed locked in the same icy stillness that gripped the town, their clay banks now hard as granite in the cold. It was as if the brilliant colors that had enlivened fall and summer had been drained from the landscape, creating a world of brown and gray.

Not surprisingly, life took on a similar dullness, with most of the townspeople holed up in their homes and business places. The streets and park were generally deserted, the residential yards empty, the stone courthouse like a gigantic tombstone, gray and frozen.

In early January my father took to wearing a thick wool sweater, even with a fire blazing only a few feet away. Sitting in his chair, his feet sunk deep in a pair of old house shoes, he would read and shake his head, read and shake his head, though he rarely mentioned the nature of the story he was reading. Once, however, he looked up after a long round of head-shaking to tell me that if the Freedom Riders came to Choctaw, I was to stay clear of the bus station, and that on no account was I to join “that bunch,” as he called them, that might gather there in order to intimidate the riders.

“A person has a right to ride a bus,” he said in conclusion, the only comment he made as the South approached that terrible summer of 1962.

As for things at Choctaw High, they were as fixed in the same wintry stillness as the rest of the town. The football season had ended, and although the basketball season was in full swing, the games were sparsely attended, and the Friday pep rallies that had preceded each football game had given way to dull end-of-week assemblies in which Mr. Avery listed the usual complaints about chewing gum and smoking in the bathroom.

Under the pressure of this wintry monotony, relationships that had flourished throughout the preceding months began to unravel. Eddie Smathers broke up with Debbie McNair, and Sheila Cameron broke up with Loyal Rhodes, her college man, though she returned to him a short three months later.

But more than anything, it was the breakup of Todd Jeffries and Mary Diehl that set tongues wagging in the corridors of Choctaw High that winter. It was as if an ideal had been shattered, leaving those couples who remained together feeling more vulnerable. I remember seeing Mary walking in a kind of daze through the noisy high school hallways, her books held like small shields against her chest, her face frozen in a look of stunned disbelief. As for Todd, I would sometimes spot him trudging wearily across the school parking lot, head bent against the icy winter wind. His friends surrounded him protectively, however, particularly Eddie Smathers, who had his own romantic troubles.

Even Luke and Betty Ann had their problems that winter, though they never actually broke up. Instead, they complained about each other, Luke that Betty Ann sometimes flirted with other boys, Betty Ann that Luke often paid too little attention to her. But even in their battles, they struck me as curiously comfortable with each other, as if some line had been drawn early on that neither would ever cross. Perhaps they had found a form of young love that even in its youth was strangely old, more settled and enduring. Or perhaps it was simply that Betty Ann never felt for Luke what Mary Diehl felt for Todd Jeffries, never assumed that in losing him she might be losing everything, and so never became subject to the terrible diminishment Mary faced each time she faced losing Todd. For why would she have fought for him so furiously, clung to him so desperately, if she had not believed that without him she was nothing?

“Mary looked like a ghost that winter,” Noreen once said to me. And she was right, although it was not Mary who occupied my thoughts at that time, but Kelli, though with perhaps the same sense of dread Mary must have felt each time she thought of losing Todd.

For I knew that in such a volatile situation, with so many couples breaking up, it was inevitable that a few unhinged males would approach Kelli, and they did. Eddie asked her out on a date the second week in January, but Kelli said no. The following week, Malcolm McCoy, Dr. McCoy’s wastrel son, made a play as well, and was also turned down. A few others came forward tentatively, then ricocheted away from a rejection that seemed imminent.

Throughout January and February I watched them come and go, and at each approach I felt a mounting wave of fear. Even so, I remained reluctant to approach Kelli myself, not only afraid that she would turn me down just as she had the others, but that I would be left more exposed afterward than they had been, ridiculed and made fun of, since to love someone who does not love you is the only tragedy we laugh at and deride.

So I was stymied, unable to approach Kelli as Eddie and the others had, and because of that, forced to seek a different, less direct way. It was during this time that I began to imagine winning Kelli by bizarre and fantastical means. I imagined her deathly ill, but saved by a cure I was able to discover in the nick of time. After that, she would certainly fall in love with me. I imagined winning prizes and scholarships, becoming instantly famous. After that, I supposed, she would certainly fall in love with me. I knew that such scenarios were preposterous, and even childish, but they swam into my mind anyway, lingering there for hours at a time as I lay in my bed, my eyes trained on the dark ceiling.

At some point, although I do not know when or how, these various and at times ludicrous fantasies converged into one compelling idea, the notion that at some point there would be a “right moment,” and that in that instant I would act in such a way as to win Kelli’s love forever. I imagined it as a scene of electrifying drama. In an act of sacrificial courage, for example, I might save her from drowning, pull her from the path of a speeding car or rescue her from the clutches of a bully I continually imagined in the form of Carter Dillbeck. Something would change between us after that. Kelli would begin to look at me in a different way. A spark would be ignited, the sort that burned in Mary Diehl’s eyes when she gazed at Todd Jeffries, for example. All that was required was some situation in which I could show myself, demonstrate my courage, the fact that I alone would never disappoint her. After that, she would be mine.

I drifted among these fantasies for quite some time before a wholly different notion took hold, one that was far more aggressive, and which was no doubt born of the increasing frustration I felt at being continually near Kelli, but unable to touch her, or even to tell her what I really felt. And so I decided on a more direct course of action. Instead of waiting passively for the “right moment” to emerge, I would actively seek ways to expose Kelli to danger, consciously move her toward peril. Then I would rescue her from its clutches.

And so, taking a cue from my father, I sought out odd calamities, and on the pretext of “covering” them for the Wildcat, I insisted that Kelli and I check them out. She was always willing to do it, and so, at various times during those long, wintry months, we walked through the smoldering skeletons of burned barns and farmhouses, dared to cross semifrozen creeks and ponds, and even sat for hours one night in a culvert, surveilling the house of a well-known local bootlegger, hoping to get a glimpse of his clientele for some fanciful “exposé” that never materialized. Each time I heard ice crack beneath her feet, or a charred board groan under her weight, I felt a tingle of excitement and anticipation, as if putting her at risk had become my only source of rapture.

But for all that, only once did I very nearly achieve my aim of rescuing Kelli. A sleet storm had swept through the area, turning the mountain into a shimmering wonderland of ice, and I decided that we should get a few pictures for the next issue. And so, as soon as the mountain road had been cleared, we drove up to a granite precipice I knew about, and from which the whole valley could be seen.

It was, as I expected, a spectacular view, and I remember that Kelli stared out over the valley for a long time, as if in silent awe of so strange and magnificent a scene.

“It’s so beautiful,” she said. “It’s like everything has turned to crystal.”

“It happens once every few years or so,” I told her.

She gazed out over the valley, then took the photographs we’d come for and began to head back toward the car. I was walking beside her, up a small incline coated with several inches of ice, the precipice behind us, and beyond it, a sheer drop of at least a hundred and fifty feet.

Suddenly, more quickly than can be imagined, she vanished. I looked around to see her sliding helplessly toward the jagged edge of the cliff. A wooden guardrail had been erected years before, but in that frozen instant, it looked every bit as fragile as it was.

To my astonishment, Kelli was laughing as she slid, her voice falling away as she moved at a terrifying speed toward the railing. She hit it with a muffled thump, and I saw the wooden crossrail shudder for a moment, heard its timbers crack, but hold.

Kelli was still laughing, her back pressed up against the groaning rail, and I recognized instantly that she had retained a Yankee’s faith that such safety rails had been constructed according to state regulations and were frequently checked by state officials. As a southerner, however, I knew that that railing had been built by whoever had been available at the time, that it had been constructed according to no particular standard, and had, in all likelihood, never been checked a single time since its erection years before.

“Don’t move, Kelli,” I shouted as I started down the slope toward her.

She looked at me, puzzled. “What?”

“Don’t move,” I said urgently. “Just stay where you are. I’m coming.”

She laughed and waved her hand. “You don’t need to do that,” she said. Then in a single fluid movement she leaned forward, pressed her feet against the still-weaving rail and pushed forward, bringing herself to her feet.

I stopped, frozen in place, and watched helplessly as she walked casually up the slope, laughing softly and brushing bits of ice from the sleeves of her coat.

“That must be what skiing’s like,” she said when she reached me.

“Yeah, I guess so” was all I could say in reply.

We walked back to my car, Kelli still exhilarated by her slide down the icy bank, I utterly depressed that she had “saved” herself before I’d had a chance to rescue her.

On the way back down the mountain, Kelli talked lightly about her plunge down the icy slope, but I could think of nothing but the grave danger she’d been in. In my mind, I saw the old wooden rail shatter, her body tumble over the side of the cliff, falling through a vast distance of clear air, then through a crackling net of bare limbs, and finally to the frozen ground with a dreadful, lifeless thud. I saw her dead on the ground, her body growing cold in the frigid air, her eyes open and staring up at me from a hundred feet below, and it was all I could do not to shudder visibly. I knew that I had deliberately exposed her to that danger, and the terrible consequences that might have followed from that act stunned and terrified me. What if she had fallen? What if she had died? The thought filled me with a jarring emptiness, and I vowed that I would never do such a thing again, that if I were going to win Kelli Troy, it would have to be by some other means.

When we arrived at her house in Collier a few minutes later, Kelli opened the car door quickly. “See you tomorrow,” she said brightly as she got out, “and thanks for the adventure.” Then she turned and rushed toward home, leaving small gray footprints in the snow. As she disappeared into the house, I felt a great sense of relief sweep over me. I had brought her safely home. Even now I can remember the sincere warmth of that moment, how pleased I was to know that she was in her house, out of danger, beyond the grasp of even my own bizarre imaginings. And when I think of how I felt as I sat in my car during those few seconds before I drove away, sat quietly watching her house as if sent to guard her from some outer peril, I see myself in the final stage of my own romantic innocence, the last time I felt love as something utterly selfless, a quickening light. And I know that it was a feeling so pure and sacrificial that I felt it not as something new in life, but something very old, instinctual and unlearned, as if it had been passed down from that first creature who’d placed itself between danger and some other creature for which it had felt something powerful yet inexplicable, a feeling of indisputable depth and urgency, yet still without a name.

THE WEEKS PASSED, AND THERE WERE A FEW MORE BREAKUPS. But there was some coupling, too. Eddie Smathers took up with Wanda Flynn, whom he married six years later. Sheila Cameron went back to Loyal Rhodes, whom she later married, then divorced not long after Rosie’s death, her feelings toward him so bitter by then that she’d finally reclaimed her maiden name.

A few more boys approached Kelli during this time. Lee Douglas asked her out, but was turned down. Steve Whitfield did the same, and with the same result.

And so for a while, time remained on my side.

Then in late February, Tony Lancaster, a handsome senior who was also president of the Debating Club, asked Kelli out. And to my despair, she accepted.

“Told you,” Luke said when he found out about it.

I downplayed my panic. “Kelli and I are just friends,” I insisted, pretending that I was not holding my breath to see what would happen.

Nothing did. Not with Tony, nor with the two or three other boys Kelli went out with during that winter. And so, after a while, I began to feel somewhat secure again.

It was only in early March, when Todd Jeffries, still at odds with Mary Diehl, suddenly showed up at the table where Kelli and I usually ate together in the cafeteria that I began to worry.

He was wearing his football jacket of black and gold, the school colors, and a pair of ordinary blue jeans, but he looked splendid nonetheless, a boy who, in a larger world, might have thought of acting or modeling or any of a thousand other adventurous paths.

He had seemed to approach us shyly, and I remember seeing him glance toward us from his place at the end of the lunch line, his tray in his hand, hesitate for a moment before finally deciding to walk over to our table.

“Mind if I take a spot?” he asked politely.

I shrugged, concealing my astonishment. “Sure,” I said. “Have a seat.”

He sat down beside me and across from Kelli, but I knew that he had come to talk to her rather than to me, and at that moment, and with no evidence at all, I knew that Todd had been thinking of doing it for a long time, plotting as I had been plotting, waiting for his own right moment. I felt a twinge of fear, a premonition that she had already slipped from my grasp and would soon be cradled in Todd’s arms, the two of them marrying soon after graduation, having children, living out their lives in Turtle Grove, figures of local royalty.

“Hi, Kelli,” Todd said as he opened his milk carton and inserted a straw.

Kelli nodded.

Todd’s eyes remained fixed upon her. “There’s a new girl in school,” he said. “Mr. Avery asked me to take her around this morning.” He smiled. “He should have asked you instead of me.”

“Why?” Kelli asked.

“Because you probably know more about how it feels,” Todd replied. “To be new, I mean.” His eyes lingered on her a moment before darting down toward his tray.

“What’s the new girl’s name?” I asked, asserting my presence just for the record.

“Noreen something,” Todd answered. “Donovan. Noreen Donovan. She’s from Gadsden.”

I looked at Kelli. She was watching Todd carefully, as if she were evaluating him in some way, perhaps already considering, as I imagined it, what life might be like at his side.

“She’s a sophomore,” Todd added. “She seemed nice.”

“Why’d she move to Choctaw?” I asked.

“Because of what’s going on in Gadsden. Her daddy didn’t want to live there anymore.” Todd’s eyes swept over to Kelli. “You know, because of what the colored people are doing. The demonstrations.”

“I didn’t know there was that much going on in Gadsden,” I said. “It’s not in the paper.”

“They keep it out, Noreen says,” Todd told me. “But it’s pretty much a constant thing.”

Kelli leaned toward him. “What is?” she asked. “What exactly are they doing?”

“Setting up picket lines, mostly,” Todd answered. “At that little shopping center on the way in to town. You ever been to Gadsden?”

Kelli shook her head.

“Well, they have a little shopping center on the way in, near the Merita Bread place,” Todd said. “You know where I mean, don’t you, Ben? Where you can go in and buy bread right out of the oven, not even sliced yet.”

I nodded.

“Well, according to Noreen, there’s some kind of demonstration there just about every night.” Todd took his first bite of food and chewed it slowly. “That’s why Noreen’s daddy decided to move up here. To get away from it.” He shrugged. “They lived right near the shopping center, and I guess they were scared of what might happen.”

“But you said there hasn’t been any trouble,” I said.

“Not yet. But you never know what might happen in a situation like that.” He took a sip of milk. “There may be trouble here someday, too,” he said, lowering his voice. “The colored people haven’t been treated right, you know.” He glanced over at Kelli. “I mean, if I’d been treated the way they’ve been treated, I’d be demonstrating just like they are.”

Kelli said nothing, but she held her gaze on Todd with an unmistakable intensity that frightened and alarmed me.

Eddie Smathers came up a few seconds later, slapped Todd on the back and sat down beside him. He had become Todd’s constant sidekick by then, and his attitude was characteristically worshipful, his questions always tentative, as if seeking Todd’s answers so that he could agree with them.

“Going to the show this weekend?” Eddie asked.

Todd pulled his eyes away from Kelli and shrugged. “What’s on?”

“A Summer Place,” Eddie said. “It’s got Sandra Dee and Troy Donahue. I heard it was pretty hot.”

Todd laughed. “Hot? With Sandra Dee? I doubt that.”

Eddie laughed with him. “Yeah. How could it be hot with Sandra Dee?” He nodded toward me and poked Todd in the ribs. “Of course, Ben sort of has a thing for Troy Donahue, right, Ben?”

I stared at him icily, but said nothing. Something was happening that I would not have thought possible only a few minutes before; my world was crumbling. In my mind, I cursed Mary Diehl for her inadequacies, for not doing or being whatever she had to do or be in order to keep Todd satisfied.

The bell sounded, signaling the end of lunch period, and we all rose from our seats to take our trays, dump them and go to class.

“Well, see you later, Ben,” Todd said as he got to his feet, Eddie in tow beside him. Then he looked at Kelli. “Nice talking to you,” he said, and, just as he pulled away, reached over and touched her shoulder, the tips of his long, slender fingers actually disappearing into her black hair.

Kelli and I dumped our trays, then walked out of the lunchroom and down the corridor toward Miss Carver’s classroom, a great bustle of students flowing in all directions around us.

“Todd’s going to ask you out,” I said as lightly as I could. “I could tell by the way he was talking to you.”

“No he’s not,” Kelli said, dismissing the idea.

I pretended to be joking with her. “Yeah, he is,” I insisted. “He’s probably going to ask you to go see A Summer Place with him. You know, because it’s supposed to be such a hot movie.”

Kelli laughed. “Well, even if he did ask me, I wouldn’t go out with him.”

I stared at her, astonished. “You wouldn’t? You wouldn’t go out with Todd Jeffries? Why not?”

Kelli turned toward me, now so serious about what she was about to say that I knew it came from something in her past experience, something that lingered in her, like a warning. “Because right now he seems perfect,” Kelli told me, “and so it would just be a matter of time before I’d be disappointed in him.”

She stopped at her locker. She opened it, and drew out Willa Cather’s A Lost Lady, another of Miss Carver’s tales of doomed love, the penultimate we would read that year, and the one destined to be Kelli’s favorite.

“You really wouldn’t go out with him?” I asked doubtfully.

Kelli looked at me, surprised by the question. “Why do you keep asking me that?”

“Because it’s hard to believe. All the girls want to go out with Todd.”

Kelli shrugged. “Well, it’s just that I think it’s better to start out with someone who’s not so great,” she said matter-of-factly, “but somebody who becomes great as you get to know him.”

In the vanity of the moment, it seemed like a formula devised with me in mind.

“You really feel that way?” I persisted.

She nodded, closed the door of her locker and headed down the corridor.

I walked along beside her, silent, but inexpressibly uplifted. It was as if I had suddenly grown taller and more handsome, discarded my glasses, become the equal of Todd Jeffries, a figure of consequence as he was, but for whom, unlike Todd, other glories still awaited.

It was an air of triumph that must have clung to me all that day. For after school, when Luke and I met in the parking lot, he noticed it immediately.

“You look, I don’t know … happy,” he said.

I nodded.

“So what happened? Did Mr. Arlington finally give you an A or something?”

“No,” I answered. “Nothing like that.”

“What then?”

I shrugged. “Nothing, Luke. I guess I just feel good for some reason, that’s all.”

He did not believe me. “There’s got to be a reason,” he insisted. He gave me a playful shove. “Come on, you can tell me. What is it, Ben?”

I couldn’t answer him exactly. Any more then than I can now, when, after I have been locked in a long silence, he will draw the old pipe from his lips and look at me worriedly, sensing some troubled part of me he cannot reach, the same chilling question in his eyes: What is it, Ben?