Breakheart Hill

CHAPTER 12

ONE SPRING EVENING ONLY A MONTH OR SO BEFORE MISS Troy’s death, Luke and I sat together in the front yard of his house in Turtle Grove. He tapped his pipe on the side of his chair, coughed softly and said, “Our fathers believed that order was the most important thing.”

During the preceding years he had been studying American history, particularly the Puritans, for whom he had developed a special interest as well as a special fondness. He had even acquired the habit of referring to them as “our fathers” in a tone of great reverence. His library was dotted with volumes detailing their physical struggle to carve a world out of the Massachusetts wilderness, but it was their commitment to a moral ideal that most intrigued him, and to which he continually alluded.

I nodded casually at his remark that evening, but my mind was fixed on something else, an old man I’d treated earlier in the day. A tractor had rolled over on him, crushing his left leg, and I’d been struck by how bravely he’d endured what had to have been a very painful examination.

“You know why order was so important to them, Ben?” Luke asked.

I shook my head, barely listening.

“Because our fathers believed that when people did a bad, or, in their words, a ‘disorderly’ thing, it didn’t end with them. It didn’t even end with the people they might have hurt when they did it.” He returned the pipe to his mouth. “It just kept on going down through time.”

Although Luke could not have known it, the remark struck me as bluntly as a hammer. “So when does it end?” I asked pointedly.

Luke shook his head at the appalling truth our fathers had pronounced. “Never,” he replied. “It never ends.”

I pulled my eyes away from him and settled them on a house a few blocks in the distance. It had once been the home of Sheila Cameron, and I could see it very clearly, the stately white façade, the broad green lawn that swept out from it and finally the low curb that rose along the edge of the smoothly paved street. I saw Rosie glance to the left, her eyes widening in what must have been a moment of supreme terror and unreality as the car plunged toward her through a screen of rain.

“So a single act is like a stream, you might say,” Luke went on. “It spurts up out of the ground, and after that it just runs on forever.”

My mind was still concentrated on Rosie’s shattered body, the way it had felt in my arms when I’d lifted it from the stretcher. “When I picked her up,” I said, “she felt like a bundle of broken sticks.”

“What?” Luke asked, his voice suddenly very tense. “Picked who up, Ben?”

I turned toward him, unable to answer.

“What is it, Ben?” Luke looked shaken, as if I’d taken him to the verge of a terrible revelation, and I realized that he’d thought I meant Kelli, that it was her body that had felt like a bundle of sticks, something I could not have known unless …

“Rosie Cameron,” I answered quickly.

Luke’s face regained its color. “Oh,” he murmured.

I nodded toward the place where it had happened. “I delivered her, you know. I put her in Sheila’s arms.” I could recall the great satisfaction I’d felt in handing Sheila her newborn daughter, how radiant she’d looked as she’d taken Rosie to her breast, so different from the rigid figure behind the dark glasses who is Sheila Cameron now. Her husband Loyal had stood beside the bed, beaming down at his wife and daughter. After a moment, Sheila lifted the child toward him, and he took her carefully into his arms while Sheila looked on. For an instant, they seemed to reach a moment of supreme happiness so uncomplicated and complete that it had the look of something fixed and eternal.

Luke shook his head. “Terrible accident,” he said. “And then everything that happened after it …” He gnawed his pipe stem for a moment, then repeated, “Terrible accident.”

I knew better, of course. I knew from what source the black stream had come, the one Luke had just been talking about, the poisonous stream that bubbles up in a single thoughtless moment, and then flows down through the generations. “We have to be so careful,” I whispered.

Luke looked at me sharply. “Careful about what, Ben?”

I gave him the only answer I knew. “Everything.”

And I thought of Kelli Troy, of how early she must have grasped some intuitive sense of that endless stream of wrong “our fathers” had seen more clearly than ourselves. Or why else would she have risked so much to do the right thing?

THE RIGHT THING, AS IT TURNED OUT, WAS TO ACT AGAINST her fear. But I didn’t know that until she finally told me herself.

It was the first week in April, and I found her sitting in the Wildcat office when I got there. She was finishing the last pages of Cather’s A Lost Lady, and she did not look up until she’d closed the book.

“What’d you think of it?” I asked a little stiffly as I sat down at my desk. She had been so withdrawn during the last few weeks that I hardly expected more than a crisp, peremptory answer.

“It was beautiful,” Kelli said, her voice less distant than it had been recently. “What did you think about it?”

It was the first real question she’d asked me since that night in Gadsden. I stopped what I was doing and turned to her, no longer able to keep my feelings inside. “Do you really care what I think?” I asked bluntly.

She did not look surprised by the question, or by the disgruntled, accusatory tone in which I’d asked it.

“I haven’t been very nice to you lately, I know,” she said. Her eyes were very dark, and in the strangely intimate light of the little basement office, they took on an earthy richness of tone and color. Instantly, as I realize now, my hope of one day marrying her was powerfully rekindled. But also, and quite abruptly, I had a brief, intense vision of taking her to the crest of Breakheart Hill, lowering her onto a deep, red blanket … and all the rest.

“I’m sorry about the way I’ve been acting, Ben,” Kelli said.

I hardly heard her. For I was on Breakheart Hill, swept away, with all of Choctaw below me, and Kelli beneath me, staring intently into my eyes while her fingers played in my hair. For a brief, hallucinatory instant, I had it all, and every bit of it so real and fully realized that it seemed more like a memory than a fantasy.

“I haven’t been nice to anybody lately,” Kelli went on. “I guess lots of people have noticed.”

The vision shattered, and I was once again in the uninspired basement office, with Kelli sitting only a few feet away, her fingers nowhere near my hair, but cradling a small paperback book instead.

“Yes, they have,” I told her. “Miss Carver thought you were in some kind of trouble.”

“I was,” Kelli said forthrightly.

I was startled by her sudden admission. Pursuing it struck me as a way of moving her into my confidence, at last. “You were?”

“That night in Gadsden threw me off a little.”

“In what way?”

“It scared me, Ben. That boy, the one with Eddie.”

“Lyle Gates,” I said. “He’s not really a boy.”

“He looked like a boy,” Kelli said, “but what you said about him, it scared me.… And I’ve heard other things since then. That he beat up a boy during a game and got thrown out of school. That he tried to kidnap his daughter. That he had a gun when he tried to do it.” She looked at me intently. “Is all that true, Ben?”

“I guess so,” I told her, “but it doesn’t matter. He doesn’t know you, or what you were doing in Gadsden that night.”

She pulled her chair up slightly and leaned toward me, her eyes intense. “I know that,” she said, “but he still made me afraid to do what I’d intended to do that night.”

“So that’s what’s been bothering you—Lyle Gates?”

“Not him, but the way he made me feel.”

“How?”

“Like a coward,” Kelli said. Then, as she had so many times before, she reached into her book bag and handed me a folded sheet of paper. “But I don’t want to be a coward. I don’t want to go through life like that, disappointing myself and everybody else, being afraid.”

I started to put the paper away, intending to read it at home, as I always did, but Kelli didn’t want it that way.

“Would you mind reading it now?”

“I thought you didn’t like to be around when I read your stuff.”

Her face was eerily calm, nearly motionless, but I knew that she was exercising a great deal of control to keep it that way. “This time I do” was all she said, and even this she said quietly, with no sense of how much there was at stake.

It was only two pages, all of it written in her tiny script, but within that limited framework she had caught much that had escaped me. She had seen the stiff placards flapping in the cold, the dark faces beneath them, somber and determined, the lighted windows that served as backdrop, throwing the marchers into even deeper shadow. She had noticed the forlorn clothing they’d worn that night, how feebly it had protected them against the cold, and even more, how its very inadequacy suggested what she called “the hand-me-down quality of the life they are resisting.”

Her rendering of that life stung me. The words were simple and direct, in a style that was not exactly Kelli’s, but which she had adopted in order to speak about what she perceived to be the great issue of our youth:

We are young now, all of us at Choctaw High, and because we are young, we are not expected to think much about what is going on throughout the South. But that night in Gadsden, I saw people our age who had thought about their lives, and who wanted to change them. They had decided that they could not afford to be young, and in their eyes, there was a maturity that is not in our eyes. They are as young as we are, but their past, what they have lived through, has made them throw off their youth earlier than they should have needed to. And so they look older and more serious than we look. This has made them beautiful.

I remember glancing up at Kelli when I read that last sentence. She was sitting with her hands in her lap, her eyes very steady, her face infinitely quiet.

“Will you publish it, Ben?” she asked.

I hesitated. “You know that this could cause you some problems, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

I waited for her to say something else, because I could see an odd restlessness in her eyes, but she remained silent.

“Are you sure you’re ready for that?” I asked. “Because it may not just come from people like Lyle Gates. It may come from other people, people you think of as your friends.”

She answered by asking a question that had probably been in her mind for quite some time. “Why didn’t you ever write anything about what we saw in Gadsden, Ben?”

“I guess I was waiting for you to write about it with me,” I told her.

“Were you afraid?”

Like a blow, I recognized that her first question had been more than an accusation. It had been a challenge to live up to some kind of standard, to face life squarely, bravely, perhaps from time to time heroically.

“Maybe,” I admitted, my eyes now intently fixed upon her, taking in her courage, turning it into mine. “But not now.”

She looked relieved. And I suppose that I felt at that moment what all men feel at that point in life when they dream of winning an unwinnable heart—the need to be good, to be righteous, to be of service, dutiful and brave, to be trusted and commanded, and sent out to slay dragons. It is perhaps the only instant of high romance we can still in truth attain, a moment, however brief, when chivalry is not a fiction from the old time, but the whole force and shaping passion of our lives.

“We will never be afraid again,” I promised Kelli Troy.

Despite the boyish grandeur of my assurance, she seemed genuinely taken by it. “I’ll try to remember that,” she said softly.

Something loosened its grip on me, and I felt myself struggle to keep my eyes from glistening, so deeply did I feel the need to serve her, to rise to whatever occasion might present itself, to be what I had beheld in everything from old movies to epic verse. And so for once I said what I felt in as bold and determined a voice as I could manage at that moment. “I would never let anyone hurt you, Kelli.”

Kelli said nothing else, but only stared at me silently for a few seconds, as if trying to arrive at some conclusion about me. Then she reached into her bag again and pulled out a slender box she’d wrapped in bright red foil. “I haven’t been very nice to you lately, Ben. And so I wanted to give you something to make up for it, and maybe just to say I’m sorry.”

I took the package from her hand. “Should I open it now?”

“If you want to.”

From the shape, I thought it was a tie, but when I opened the box and slowly drew back the white tissue in which it had been wrapped, I saw that Kelli had bought me something far more personal and important.

“A stethoscope,” I said.

Kelli smiled. “I wanted to get you something really special. Something really nice.” She nodded at it approvingly. “It’s a real one,” she added, clearly proud of her choice, “but I guess you can tell that.”

“Yes, I can,” I told her. I hooked the silver earpiece around my neck and ran my finger over the long black rubber tube that led to the tympanum. “It’s wonderful, Kelli.”

“Let’s try it out,” she said, and happiness seemed to surge through her voice. Then she took the tympanum and placed it on her chest.

“Can you hear it?” she asked.

I placed the earplugs in my ears and listened. I could hear the steady, muffled beat of her heart, soft and rhythmic, and suddenly I felt my whole body quicken to its pace, delicate, but thrilling. It was as close to intimacy as I had ever come, and in some sense, I suppose, as close as I would ever come in all the years after that.

I felt my breath quicken. My fingers tightened around the black tube of the stethoscope, and for the first time I felt my physical yearning as something separate from myself, a creature strapped within my skin, pent-up and explosive, barely within the grip of my control.

I quickly pulled the stethoscope away from her chest and turned away. “Your heart sounds pretty strong,” I told her matter-of-factly, carefully aping the tone of an examining physician, scientific and professional, desperate to conceal the disturbing rush that had suddenly swept over me, and in whose stormy eddies I was still adrift. “Very strong,” I repeated as I drew the stethoscope from my ears.

And it was strong, as it turned out, fierce and inexhaustible. But there was another part of her that proved more vulnerable to assault.

It was many years later when I actually saw that part. Dr. McCoy had died several weeks before, and in the course of going through the files he’d boxed and stored away at his retirement, I came upon an old one, its identifying letters faded with the years, but still distinctly visible: TROY, ELIZABETH KELLI.

At first, I couldn’t open it. But after a time, I pulled myself together and took the file to the adjoining room. I held the X-rays I found inside up to the light box. There, in muted patterns of black and gray, I saw the curved box that encased her brain, the column of knotty vertebrae that supported it, the bony caverns from which had shone her eyes, the cartilage that had given her nose its distinctive shape. I also saw what had been done to her: the dark flow of hemorrhaged blood, the skull’s moonscape of lesions, fractures and contusions, a long splinter of broken bone sunk like a white needle into the gray folds of her brain. I stood transfixed before the X-rays’ unflinching record of her destruction, and during those few whirling seconds I relived it all, day by wrenching day, step by wrenching step, until I reached the end, and heard her breathe, Not you.