Breakheart Hill

CHAPTER 11

THREE WEEKS AFTER THE TRIP TO GADSDEN, MY FATHER arranged for me to have a meeting with Dr. Walter McCoy, the oldest and most respected physician in Choctaw. Dr. McCoy was not a warm man, and without doubt one of the reasons he’d gone into medicine in the first place was the money he could make. Still, he was a thorough professional, and what he lacked in sweetness he made up for in competence.

He received me very formally that day, and perhaps a little skeptically, too.

“So, your father tells me you want to be a doctor,” he began.

He lowered himself into the old wooden swivel chair behind his desk and drew his white lab coat over his rounded stomach, his fingers toying with its white plastic buttons. “Lots of people want to be doctors nowadays. Probably because they’ve been watching doctor shows on TV.”

I felt an immediate need to separate myself from those people whom Dr. McCoy clearly regarded as whimsical in their dedication to a medical career. “I don’t watch much television,” I told him.

“Too busy studying, is that it?”

I nodded.

“Good,” Dr. McCoy said. “You’ll have to get used to studying quite a lot if you want to be a doctor.”

“Yes, sir,” I said reverently.

Dr. McCoy seemed to take me seriously for a moment, even to the point of assuming that I would actually become a doctor. “And when you get your degree, where do you intend to set up practice?” he asked.

I thought instantly of Kelli, of the future I had so entirely imagined for us by then. “Right here in Choctaw,” I told him.

Dr. McCoy looked at me with mock seriousness. “So, you’re going to be my competition, are you?”

I didn’t know what the right answer might be to such a question. So I said only, “I guess so.”

But I never was part of Dr. McCoy’s competition. Years later, when I finished medical school and returned to Choctaw, he asked to meet with me. “I’m getting old, Dr. Wade,” he told me, “and my son was never interested in medicine, so I have to think about turning my practice over to someone else one day.”

I could see how the misspent quality of his son’s life had disappointed him, but I said nothing.

“I’d like my practice to go on,” Dr. McCoy told me. He smiled thinly. “After I’m gone, you know. For someone else.”

He had decided that that “someone else” was me, and not long after that I joined his practice, moving into the offices he maintained only a few hundred yards from the Choctaw County Courthouse, the same gray building in which Lyle Gates had been tried more than ten years before.

From my own consulting room I can glance out the window and see the old courthouse in all its granite majesty, but I rarely look in that direction. Instead, over the years, I have concentrated on the future, on being a good doctor and gaining a reputation for compassion and generosity, as well as for skill and knowledge. It was a goal I long ago achieved, so that when I die, I know this town will remember me fondly, speak of me warmly, even place a portrait of me in the sleek modern entrance of the new hospital. Under it, a plaque will no doubt record how nobly I lived, how selfless I was, how much I contributed to the welfare of my community. I have often imagined this plaque, along with the figure of a woman as she stands facing it. She is middle-aged, but still erect and slender, with dark curly hair. She has her arms wrapped around herself, as if holding something tight inside, and I know that this ghostly woman is Kelli Troy and that she is silently reviewing the list of my accomplishments, how I was the first doctor to build a clinic in the black part of Choctaw, the first to build a rural clinic on the mountain, the first to make weekly rounds at the city jail. Then, when she has finished reading, she turns to face me. And I see that her beauty is undiminished from the old time, that all her loss and suffering has only given her a deeper grace. For a moment she peers at me silently. A terrible judgment gathers behind her eyes. Then, at last, she speaks, and what she says both amazes and devastates me, for it is spoken in a voice that has not aged in thirty years, nor lost any of the fierce passion I’d heard in it so long ago: Ah, Ben, I am so proud of you.

BUT SHE WAS NOT ALWAYS PROUD OF ME, NOR OF HERSELF, either.

In the days following our trip to Gadsden, Kelli grew oddly distant. She drew inward, wrapping herself in long silences I was reluctant to interrupt. Although we continued to work on the Wildcat as often as we always had, I sensed that some part of Kelli’s earlier dedication to it had slipped away. Her pace slowed, and she offered no new ideas for the coming issue. When I dared to offer one or two, she would nod her head approvingly, but add nothing more. It was as if she had decided to exist only on the periphery, doing layout or routinely editing someone else’s story rather than pursuing something of her own.

The same distance continued outside the newspaper office. In class she sat in a kind of suspension, vaguely attuned to what was going on around her, but unmoved by it. The little debates that occasionally flared up in Mr. Arlington’s history class swirled around her like small winds around a large stone, incapable of drawing her in. The same listlessness followed her down the corridor to the next class, then the next, until at the final bell, she would either join me in the basement or walk mutely to her bus, take her seat near the front and wait to be driven home.

Now, when I think of her in those last days of winter, I see her wrapped in her inward trouble, silenced by its depths, a teenage girl who had suddenly been made to face something she didn’t like, but from which she could not withdraw.

Everyone seemed to have a theory as to what might be wrong with Kelli. Sheila Cameron asked me if perhaps Kelli was having some kind of “female” trouble, and even suggested that she see Dr. McCoy. “Girls get that way when it comes on them, you know,” she said in a quick, confiding whisper.

Luke had a theory, too. “My guess is, it’s finally set in.”

“What has?”

“Homesickness,” Luke answered matter-of-factly.

We were at Cuffy’s, of course, and outside, a cold winter rain was thumping against the window. Luke took a spoonful of his Frito Pie and added, “She’s probably been fighting it for quite a while.”

“But she seemed to like Choctaw before this,” I protested. “Remember what she was like at Sheila’s Christmas dance?”

“She can like it okay,” Luke replied. “But she can still think about the way it was up north, the people she left behind.”

Later that evening, sitting by the fire, my father reading the newspaper in his shabby wool sweater only a few feet away, I thought about these mysterious “people” whom Kelli had left in Baltimore. Perhaps there was a boyfriend still pining for her, a disconsolate friend, a relative. It was then that I recalled the sudden passion with which Kelli had told me that she had no father. But everyone had a father, I told myself emphatically. Perhaps Kelli’s distress had something to do with him.

I tried the theory out on Luke the very next day.

“Maybe it has to do with her father,” I said. “Maybe he’s turned up or written her, or something like that.”

“Who is he?” Luke asked.

“I don’t know,” I admitted. I was reluctant to say more, and certainly reluctant to repeat Kelli’s bizarre declaration that she had no father.

“Well, maybe he’s dead.”

“Maybe.”

Luke shook his head. “My guess is, she’s homesick, like I said before.” He gave me a friendly punch. “Don’t worry, Ben, she’ll snap out of it.”

But she didn’t. And as day followed day, I felt Kelli’s loss as a steadily darkening atmosphere, an aching gloom that seemed to overtake me as completely as it had overtaken her, robbing the radiance from her eyes, smothering that part of her that burned with a mysterious energy.

“Maybe you should just ask her straight out,” Luke suggested finally.

“Sheila tried that,” I told him, “but Kelli really didn’t say much.”

“Well, she’s got to be talking to somebody,” Luke said emphatically.

Then it occurred to me that there was at least one other person I could consult. From time to time during the last few days, I’d spotted Kelli talking briefly with Noreen, the two of them walking together in the hallway or down the steps toward Kelli’s waiting bus. At those moments, Kelli had seemed a bit lighter. Once I had even glimpsed the flicker of a smile.

It was at the end of the school day on a Friday when I spotted Noreen as she headed down the walkway to where her mother usually picked her up. I had noticed that her mother was not usually there when Noreen reached the pickup point, and that Noreen often had to wait for quite some time beside the short brick columns at the end of the sidewalk, sometimes leaning wearily against them, angry and exasperated.

It was very cold that day, and she looked nearly frozen as I approached her. Her face was red with the cold, and her eyes were squeezed together so tightly I could barely make out their color.

She answered my greeting glumly, her eyes glancing irritably up the street. “It’s freezing.”

“Waiting for your mother?”

“Like always. She’s never on time.”

“I could take you home,” I told her.

She looked at me, clearly surprised by the offer. Then she said, “I’d better wait for my mother.”

I smiled. “Why? She doesn’t wait for you.”

It had been a clever response, and Noreen clearly appreciated the hint of revenge against her mother that was embedded in it.

“Okay, let’s go,” she said with a sudden relish. “It’ll teach her to be late in weather like this.”

On the way to Noreen’s house we talked about trivial things until I finally summoned the will to bring up Kelli Troy.

“Kelli’s been acting strange,” I said casually, as if it were no more than an aside.

Noreen nodded, but said nothing.

“What do you reckon’s the matter with her?”

Noreen shrugged.

I waited a moment longer, then added, “She hardly talks to me anymore.”

Noreen’s eyes flashed a sudden recognition. “That’s why you offered to give me a ride, isn’t it? You just wanted to get me to tell you stuff about Kelli.”

I looked at her helplessly but said nothing. I had sought only to use her, and she was far too clever not to have noticed. There was no point in pretending that I’d had any other purpose in mind.

“You should have just come right out and told me that’s what you were after,” Noreen said, the sharpness still in her voice. “If you want to talk about Kelli, we’ll talk about Kelli. I’m not as stupid as you think, Ben. I know you’re in love with Kelli,” she said.

Did she hope I might deny it? When I didn’t, I saw a strange disappointment appear briefly, then vanish from her eyes. “What do you want to know about Kelli?” she asked wearily, as if accepting a role she had not wanted but was willing to perform.

“It’s just that she’s been acting strange,” I said weakly, “and I was wondering if you had any idea what’s bothering her.”

Noreen shook her head. “No, I don’t,” she said. “We’re not like that. We’re not close.”

“But I see you talking together sometimes.”

“It’s not really talking,” Noreen said. “Not like you mean. Not serious. Just chitchat.”

I nodded weakly. “Okay. I just thought I’d ask.”

We rode in silence after that; then, as we neared Noreen’s house, I felt her hand touch mine.

“Ben, I didn’t mean to get mad at you before,” she said softly. “I know what you’re going through. I know it’s hard to deal with.”

I discarded the last remnants of my disguise. “Yes, it is,” I told her in what struck me as a deep admission, one that left me terribly exposed.

She smiled sadly, a knowing smile, full of acceptance, and I saw the woman she would soon become, and be forever after that.

“I don’t know what to do,” I told her.

She nodded slowly, then made the darkest and most tragic pronouncement I had ever heard. “When you love someone, it doesn’t make them love you back,” she said.

She said it only once, and in all the years since then, she has not repeated it.

But she has said other things, and they have often borne a kindred somberness. Several years ago, while at a medical convention in Atlanta, we went to a foreign movie, the sort that never comes to the theaters in Choctaw. It was about Camille Claudel, the woman who’d loved Rodin so madly, loved him to distraction, her love rushing her wildly over the brink of a dreadful folly.

Afterward, back at our hotel, Noreen and I settled into bed, my arms draped lightly around her shoulders, her head pressed against my chest.

“Everyone deserves to be loved like Rodin was,” I said thoughtlessly, hoping to do no more than initiate a bit of conversation before we fell asleep.

Noreen shook her head. “No,” she said firmly. “Everyone wants to be loved like that, but not everyone deserves to be.” For a moment I thought her eyes were glistening, and in that instant I felt the full weight of Breakheart Hill as it had lain upon her shoulders, the long years she had lived beneath the shadow of a love she would never receive from me, but which she knew I had once given—and in some fathomless way still gave—to another. She had lived gallantly without it, but as my wife lay silently beside me that night, I knew that its sharp pang had never left her, that there had not been a single day during the last thirty years when she had not felt its raw, persistent ache.

But as we pulled into the driveway of Noreen’s house that cold afternoon, neither of us could have known that in talking about Kelli Troy, we were talking about both our joint and our separate destinies.

Noreen remained in the car for a moment after we came to a halt. She seemed to be thinking about what she should do.

“I’ll try to talk to Kelli if you want me to,” she said finally.

I shook my head. “No, you better not,” I told her. “If she wants to keep everything to herself, then I think we should let her.”

Noreen’s eyes lingered on me. “You’re a nice boy, Ben.” The next words seemed hard for her to say. “I like you.”

In return, I gave her nothing more than a quick, peremptory nod. “Thanks, Noreen. For everything.”

A shadow crossed her face. She looked as if she’d been formally dismissed, turned quickly, opened the door and got out of the car. A cold blast had swept down from the mountain, and by the time she reached the front door, she’d folded her collar up against it.

AFTER THAT, I DIDN’T MENTION KELLI’S CHANGED BEHAVIOR to anyone. So when it was raised again only a week later, it was Miss Carver who raised it. It was a morning in late March, and the same icy wave was still bearing down on Choctaw. I was making my way quickly from my car to the front door of the school, and had nearly made it to the top of the stairs when I heard someone call my name. I turned and saw Miss Carver coming up behind me, her huge brown briefcase hanging like a great weight from her gloved hand.

“Ben, do you have a minute?” she asked when she reached me.

I told her I did, then followed her inside. She walked quickly up the stairs to her classroom, placed the briefcase beside her desk and stared directly toward me.

“Is Kelli still working with you on the Wildcat?” she asked as she pulled off her gloves.

“Yes.”

“Have you noticed any change in her attitude lately?”

I felt uncomfortable discussing such things with a teacher, so I offered her very little. “She seems quieter” was all I said.

“Has she said anything to you about any trouble she might be having?”

“No.”

When I think of that morning now, I am struck by how innocent Miss Carver’s inquiries were, searching but not accusatory, and in that way quite different from the questions she would put to me three months later, her voice tense, guarded, profoundly skeptical, a woman who knew a liar when she saw one.

“So you have no idea what’s bothering Kelli?”

I felt embarrassed by my answer. “No, she hasn’t talked to me about anything.”

Miss Carver nodded, clearly disappointed by my lack of information. “Well, if you do get an idea of what’s bothering her, I hope you’ll tell me.” She looked at me significantly. “A girl like Kelli can get into trouble at this age.”

I might have interpreted “trouble” in many ways, but by then I’d learned enough about Miss Carver to know the kind of trouble to which she referred. It was not pregnancy and certainly not the “trouble” that plagues young people now, the drugs and violence and grave illness to which they may fall prey. The perils of Miss Carver’s world were all romantic perils, and so by “trouble” she had meant that Kelli was one of those lost ladies we’d all been reading about in her class that year, passionate and gifted, ripe for that particular destruction which lurks at the rim of love.

But though I knew precisely what Miss Carver had meant by “trouble,” I pretended to be more or less oblivious. “Well, I don’t think she’s in any trouble,” I said.

Miss Carver looked at me silently. It was a close, evaluating look, as if, even then, she were trying to penetrate the many layers of my deception. It was a look that never left her after that. It was still in her eyes when I saw her for the last time. Her face had grown prematurely old by then, yellow and wrinkled, and I could see her fingers plucking at the steel spokes of her wheelchair like harp strings. Her eyes were profoundly distrustful as she peered at me through the thick lenses of her glasses, and when she finally spoke, her voice was full of dire suspicions: You’re not Dr. Winn.

Thirty years before, she’d been less sharp in declaring whatever doubts she had about my character. “You’d be sure and tell me if you thought Kelli needed something, wouldn’t you?” she asked.

“Yes, I would,” I assured her.

The doubtful look remained in Miss Carver’s eyes. “I hope so,” she said.

I left the room quickly, as if it were a vise closing in on me. I felt exposed by Miss Carver’s questions, by the way my inadequate answers had suggested that Kelli and I were only co-workers on the Wildcat and that nothing of consequence, let alone intimacy, had ever passed between us. For a moment, I even felt angry at Kelli, insulted by the fact that she had not respected me enough to confide in me. My only comfort was in the belief that she hadn’t confided in anyone else either.

But she had, and when I found out who it was, it astonished me.

It was in Judge Thompson’s courtroom, of all places, that I learned about it, and as I sat motionlessly beside my father that day, I tried to keep control of the dreadful terror that had swept over me at that moment of discovery, the feeling that as error had fallen upon error, it had built a dark tower, one that would loom over Choctaw forever.

And so Kelli Troy came to talk to you about this matter, is that right? Mr. Bailey asked his witness.

The voice that answered him was steadier than I’d expected it to be.

Yes, she did.

And that was in the nature of a confidence, would you say?

I guess so. She said she didn’t want me to mention it to anybody.

Okay, now, could you tell the court just how that conversation happened to take place?

Well, Kelli just came up to me after school one afternoon. She said, “Eddie, could I talk to you a minute?”

So it was Eddie Smathers, of all people, to whom Kelli had gone in that mood of apprehension and self-doubt that had overwhelmed her in the days following her first meeting with Lyle Gates. And it was Eddie Smathers who alone knew the reason for that sense of withdrawal that had so worried Miss Carver. She had thought it a portent of doomed love, but it was nothing of the kind, as Eddie Smathers’s testimony that day made clear.

What did Miss Troy tell you, Eddie?

She talked about the night we all met at that little shopping center in Gadsden.

That would have been the same night that Ben Wade has already described to the jury, isn’t that right?

Yes, sir.

And what did Miss Troy say about that night?

She said it had scared her.

Scared her? In what way?

Well, at first, I figured she meant the way the nig—the colored people—the way they were demonstrating down there that night. I thought they’d maybe scared her a little, something like that.

But that wasn’t what had scared Miss Troy, was it?

No, sir.

What had scared her, Mr. Smathers?

Lyle had. At least that’s what Kelli said.

What did she say exactly?

She said she’d come down to Gadsden to check out what the colored people were doing, but that when Lyle showed up, she’d gotten scared to talk to them.

Did she say anything else?

Yes, she did. She said that she’d felt disappointed in herself because she’d gotten scared off by Lyle, and that she was never going to walk away from anything like that again.

Why do you think she was telling you this?

Well, I thought maybe she was sort of sending a message to

Lyle.

Did you give Lyle that message?

No, sir. I’m not that close with Lyle.

Mr. Bailey had gone on with a few more questions, most of them inconsequential, before turning Eddie over to Mr. Wylie, Lyle’s defense attorney.

Now, Mr. Smathers, can you tell us how long it was after that meeting in Gadsden that you had this conversation with Miss Troy?

About three weeks or so, I guess.

Did Miss Troy say that she’d heard from Lyle Gates since that time?

No, she didn’t.

Or seen him?

No.

Mr. Smathers, did you see anything frightening in the way Lyle Gates behaved toward Miss Troy that night in Gadsden?

No, sir.

In fact, he was pretty friendly to her, wasn’t he?

I guess so.

Did Lyle Gates ever indicate to you that he disliked Miss

Troy?

No.

Did he ever threaten her in your presence?

No.

Then why, Mr. Smathers, do you think he sits here accused of doing such awful things to her?

Eddie gave the only answer he could have. I don’t know.

Nor did he ever know.

And so even now, when I see him here and there around Choctaw, making a deal on the street or glad-handing the congregation at the First Baptist Church, Eddie seems the only person who fell within the circle of what happened on Breakheart Hill who has never felt its cruel touch. When we meet, he smiles brightly, boyishly, asks about Amy and Noreen, then pumps my hand and glides away, happy and oblivious, utterly unstained by the moral darkness that briefly swirled around him. It is as if his own intractable limitedness has worked like a suit of armor, protecting him from the piercing encroachments of a crime in which, though wholly without knowing it, he played a crucial part.

Occasionally, I have imagined confronting Eddie with all he does not know. I have played the scene in my mind endlessly. We meet by accident. He stops to chat with me as he always does. He speaks of sports, the weather, the poor condition of the mountain road. He finally runs out of chatter, starts to leave, grabs my hand.

It is then I draw him to me with a sudden, unsettling tug. Instinctively, he tries to draw away, his eyes perplexed, vaguely frightened by the violence of my grip. But I don’t let him go. I tug him closer to me. My fingers tighten like a noose around his wrist, pulling him nearer and nearer until his ear is at my lips. Then, still clasping him tightly, I whisper: “Don’t you ever wonder why?”

I am sure he never does.

But others do.

I hear them ask that question all the time. Sometimes I hear it rise toward me from the grave, as it does with my father and Shirley Troy, and even Sheriff Stone. Sometimes I hear it from the living, silently, but with an agonizing force, as when, years ago, the small bruised eyes of little Raymond Jeffries first lifted toward me beseechingly from the white sheets of my examining table. I have heard it whispered from behind the dark lenses of Sheila Cameron’s glasses, as well as from the small gray stone that marks her daughter Rosie’s grave.

There have even been occasions when I have risen from my bed, walked out onto my front porch, stared out over the lights of Choctaw and heard nothing but a chorus of low, mournful questions. Why did my husband never love me? Why did my father hate me? Why did my daughter have to die?

I stand mutely, listening to their confused and melancholy whispers. And I know that unless I tell them, they will never know.