Breakheart Hill

CHAPTER 15

THOUGH THE FOLLOWING MORNING MY FACE WAS BRUISED and one of my eyes was blue and swollen, I woke up with a terrible joy. For a time, I lay in my bed, reliving the brief heroism that had landed me in Kelli’s arms. I reviewed it all from beginning to end, from the moment Lyle had entered Cuffy’s to the moment he’d been hustled out of it by his fellow road workers, and each second of it was like a glittering gem.

At breakfast I sat proudly across from my father, and although he had always been a peaceful man, he had no quarrel with what I’d done.

“That boy shouldn’t have said something like that to Kelli,” he told me, “and I guess you didn’t have much choice but to stand up to him.” He gave me a small man-to-man smile, then returned to his newspaper.

After breakfast, I walked out into the front yard. The first green sprouts had begun to inch up from the tiny flower garden my father had planted along either edge of the driveway, and their determination to endure a long winter of isolation, then sprout suddenly to life struck me as emblematic of my own situation in regard to Kelli. I had waited and endured. Now was the time for victory.

I was still reveling in such a glorious possibility when the phone rang inside the house. I rushed in to answer it.

“Hi, Ben,” Kelli said.

“Hi.”

“How are you feeling?”

“Fine.”

“Really?”

“Yeah,” I said, heroically making light of my wounds. “How are you?”

“I’m fine, but I wasn’t the one who got hit.”

“My father put a little ice on my eye after you left, but it’s still swollen. But other than that, I’m okay.”

“I’m sorry, Ben. I didn’t mean to …”

“No, no,” I told her quickly. “It’s nothing. By Monday, nobody will even notice.”

There was a slight pause, then Kelli said, “Well, anyway, I wanted to let you know that I went up to see Mr. Prewett this morning.”

“Who?”

“The man I told you about on the way to Cuffy’s yesterday. The one who was supposed to know a lot about Choctaw.”

“Oh, yeah. I remember now.”

“Well, Mrs. Phillips was right, he did know a lot.”

“That’s great.”

“As a matter of fact, I found out why they call it Breakheart Hill.”

“You did?”

“And so I thought we might drive up there this afternoon. It would be easier to explain it if we were actually there and I could show you a few things.”

“Okay,” I said. “When do you want me to pick you up?”

“Well, I thought you might want to have lunch with my mother and me, and after that we could go up to the hill.”

“All right.”

“So, could you come here at around noon?”

I knew that Kelli didn’t want to tell me more about what she’d discovered, so I didn’t press her further. “Well, I’ll see you then,” I said.

“Noon,” Kelli repeated. “Okay, then.”

I told her good-bye, then walked back out into the yard. The morning air was soothing on my bruised face, and I slumped back in an old lawn chair, closed my eyes and let the sunlight warm me. When I opened them again, they were focused on the mountain, and after a time they drifted to the left and settled on Breakheart Hill. The trees were trimmed in green by then, but I could still see through them, all the way down to the dark ground that made up the forest floor, a deep, rich loam that would soon nourish a wild summer lushness. For a little while my mind lingered on its name, just as Kelli’s had dwelled upon it for the past few weeks, but soon I drifted into a different realm than inquiry, and imagined myself on the hill, lying on my back in the warm, sun-soaked earth, with Kelli over me, the jet-black curls of her hair falling all around me, making a tent for my face. I knew that we were naked, that we were making love, but since I’d had no such experience, it came to me not in a single, sharply focused instant of excitement, but in a rich sensual fullness, so that I touched and was touched in every way and in every place at once. There were no separate explorations, no concentration upon any single part of her. I felt all of her simultaneously, in a limitless and impossible wholeness, felt all of her in each part of her, her fingers in her lips, her pulse in her breath, all of life in every touch of life.

I SUPPOSE THAT SOME PART OF ME WAS STILL SWIRLING IN THE eddies of this sensual undertow when I arrived at Kelli’s house a few hours later. When I think of it now, I see myself in a kind of swoon, and there are even times, despite all that has happened since then, when I cannot think of it without a hesitant and very slender smile. For surely, in a certain sense, there is nothing more comical than teenage love. But the smile can hold its place only for an instant before it vanishes into that more forbidding truth, that there is nothing more deadly earnest either.

Certainly, I know that I was in deadly earnest as I joined Kelli that day, and that all during the lunch that followed I felt as if small explosions were continually going off in me. It was as if Lyle’s blows had dislodged something inside of me, a vital part that had always been tamped down but which now stormed restlessly all about, beating against my inner wall.

But for all my inward upheaval, I presented an outward face that could hardly have seemed more calm. I joked about my “war wounds,” as I called them, and dismissed the notion that in fighting Lyle Gates I’d done anything exceptional. Not only that, but I quietly assured Kelli’s mother that Lyle would never ask for more trouble, that she need not fear his knock at her door.

“Lyle’s basically a pretty good person,” I said magnanimously. “He won’t cause Kelli any more trouble.”

Both Kelli and her mother looked relieved by the time lunch ended. Miss Troy even thanked me for what I had done for Kelli.

After lunch, Kelli flung a light sweater over her shoulders, and I noticed that she’d slipped a small black camera into one of its wide pockets. “I thought I’d take a few pictures up on the hill,” she explained as she headed for the door.

It was nearly two in the afternoon by then, but still unseasonably warm, as it would be from then on. Miss Troy followed us outside, her arms bare for the first time in many months.

“Tell your father I said hello,” she said.

“I will.”

She smiled. “Such a good man, your father.”

Thirty years later she would say the same thing, standing beside me in the town cemetery on another spring day almost as warm as that one, but with her arms covered by the sleeves of a plain black dress. She’d come in from Collier to be at my father’s funeral, and she looked older and considerably more weary than she’d ever looked before. “Such a good man, your father,” she told me quietly at the end of the service. She took my hand and squeezed it, and as she did so a thought seemed to come to her mind. Her eyes bored into me for a moment, then she said, “Ben, I was wondering if I could talk to you sometime soon.”

I nodded. “Of course you can, Miss Troy.”

Three weeks later she would appear one morning in my office near the courthouse, and ask a second question, one that for all its mild and unthreatening content would shake me to the bone.

But thirty years earlier, as I climbed into my dusty gray Chevrolet, it would never have occurred to me that Shirley Troy might one day be in a position to ask a question that could instantly fill me with a chilling dread. I saw her only as Kelli’s mother, a woman who’d done her job well, raised a daughter under difficult circumstances and through it all maintained a tight grip on her dignity. That she might later haunt me with her kindness, or give my life its single most harrowing instant, none of this could have seemed possible as she stood beside my car that morning so long ago.

“Well, see ya’ll later,” she called to Kelli and me as we pulled away.

It was just warm enough to keep the windows down as we drove to Choctaw, and as I glanced toward Kelli, I noticed that she’d not buttoned her sweater, but had left it draped loosely over her shoulders.

“You must think summer’s already here,” I said.

She nodded slightly. “Do you plan to have children, Ben?” she asked suddenly.

“I hope so,” I answered, without in the least suggesting that I also fervently hoped that they would be hers as well.

“My mother says that there’s no love like the one parents feel for their children,” Kelli said. “She says it’s different from what people feel for their parents or the people they’re married to.”

“In what way?”

“She says it’s more intense.”

“You really talk to your mother, don’t you?”

Kelli nodded. “What about you? Do you talk to your father?”

“Not really.”

She looked at me closely. “Who do you talk to, Ben?”

I looked at her as sincerely as I ever had, then uttered the last truth she would ever hear from me. “You,” I told her. “Only you.”

I will always remember the smile that came to her face at that moment, how very sweet and uncomplicated it was. It was the last truly gracious moment we would have together, the instant at which I most nearly felt her love.

WE ARRIVED AT BREAKHEART HILL A FEW MINUTES LATER. Kelli got out of the car, slipped off her sweater, plucked the camera from its pocket and laid the sweater neatly on the car seat.

She was wearing a sleeveless white dress, the same one she would wear several months later, a fact that Sheriff Stone noticed when he glimpsed the photograph I took of her that day, then later taped to the wall of the basement office. By then he’d found the car tracks at the bottom of the hill and so he knew that someone other than Lyle Gates had been on the ridge that day, and I can still remember the muted accusation in what he said as he stared at the picture. Same dress, same place. Then he’d looked at me with a deadly seriousness and asked the first of several darkly probing questions: Had you taken her there often, Ben?

I had never “taken” her there, as I explained to him, and on that particular day, as I quickly added, she had taken me.

Which was true enough, of course. And yet, when I think of that afternoon, of the unseasonable warmth and the wild array of spring buds that surrounded us, I know that by “taken her there” Sheriff Stone had meant to suggest what my actual feeling was toward Kelli Troy, that it went well beyond the “friendship” I described to him so matter-of-factly in the basement office that day, and in which I am sure he never for a single moment believed.

And so, I know now, that as Kelli moved away from me, edging her way down the hill and into a flurry of tiny fledgling leaves that seemed to swirl around her like a light green snowfall, she was unconsciously entering the stage set of a play whose lines I had already written, a manufactured, hothouse tale not of doomed, but of triumphant love. Following behind her, my eyes fixed hungrily on the sway of her body as it shifted effortlessly among the clinging branches, I watched her descend into my own dark fantasy.

She was halfway down the hill before she stopped and turned back toward me. “It began all the way down there,” she said, turning back toward the slope, her arm outstretched, a single finger pointing down to where the slope suddenly fell sharply in its dive toward the bottom of the mountain. “The race, I mean.”

“They raced up the hill?” I asked.

“Yes,” Kelli answered. “From the bottom to where we are now.”

I glanced down the slope. “So steep,” I said.

She nodded. “Very steep,” she said. “What do you think the distance is from here to the bottom?”

“You mean to where that road is?” I asked, meaning the old, abandoned mining trail that skirted across the base of the mountain and along whose dusty, unused ruts Sheriff Stone would soon discern the fresh tracks of a car.

“Yes,” Kelli answered.

“It’s hard to say,” I told her. “Probably around five hundred yards.”

Kelli nodded. “That’s how far they ran then,” she said. “Five hundred yards, all the way from the road to here.”

I eased myself against a tree and stood watching her. “That’s how far who ran?”

She seemed hardly able to believe her own answer. “The fathers,” she said softly.

Then, in the last revelation she would ever grant me, Kelli told the story of Breakheart Hill.

“The first race was on July 4, 1844,” she began. “It was organized by the slave market. It was part of a promotion, you might say.”

“What kind of promotion?”

“To promote the market. It had opened only a month before, and I guess the owners wanted to draw a lot of people into Choctaw for the auction.”

And so they’d hit upon the idea of a race, one that they hoped would demonstrate the strength of the young Negro males they intended to offer for sale later that same afternoon.

“But they had to give the men a reason to go all out,” Kelli went on. “They couldn’t have them just strolling up the hill. That wouldn’t make anybody want to buy one of them later.”

I smiled, thinking I’d guessed the answer. “So they offered the winner his freedom?”

Kelli shook her head and a shadow crossed her face. “They wanted to sell them, remember?” She turned away and walked swiftly to the crest of the hill. “The white people lined up, facing each other in two lines about fifteen feet apart that stretched from the bottom of the hill to the crest. The Negro men were herded to the bottom of the hill. They wore ankle chains, but nothing around their hands. That meant that they could claw at each other, or at the ground if they couldn’t manage to stand up anymore.” She smiled at the irony of what she was about to say. “There was a band to keep the people entertained, and just before the race began, a local minister said a prayer.”

I saw it through her words: the lush green of the mountainside, the crowds at the bottom of the hill, the two lines that ran jaggedly toward the crest, and amid all that festive sound and color, a small gathering of slaves, huddled together in the stifling heat, muttering to one another perhaps, or perhaps utterly silent, staring up toward the impossible hill and the single band of red ribbon that fluttered across the distant finish line.

“The race was always held at noon,” Kelli continued, “and it always began when the market owner fired his dueling pistol.”

At that sharp sound, the crowd would burst into a roar, and the slaves would begin their long struggle up the hill, moving in short thrusts, their ankles held by short lengths of rattling chain, but otherwise free to tear and grab and fall upon each other.

For the first hundred yards, the race moved quickly, with each man intent on leaving the others behind. But within minutes, the heat and the cruel angle of the hill had begun to overtake them, and the movement slowed so that by the time they reached the midpoint of the hill, the race had usually become little more than a slowly lurching brawl, with the men desperately battling one another even as they heaved themselves inch by inch up the torturous slope.

“On the sidelines, people cheered them on,” Kelli told me softly. “Some even made bets.”

Ponderously, as the minutes passed, the great black tangle of flailing arms and legs continued its agonizing crawl up the hill’s steeper slope. Some of the men fell away, overcome by heat and exhaustion, and lay silent and motionless in the grass. But most pressed forward, sometimes on hands and knees, their chains now biting into the flesh of their ankles as they clawed their way toward the waving scarlet ribbon that waited for them at the crest of the hill.

As they closed in upon the finish line, the battle intensified and became more desperate, so that the upward movement nearly halted entirely as the men began to concentrate on keeping each other back, grabbing at the legs of the one in front of them or kicking savagely at the one behind. The earlier roar of the spectators quieted into a strange, whispery awe at the sheer fierceness of the struggle, so that for the last twenty yards the deadly battle was waged in almost total silence, with nothing but the groans of the slaves to orchestrate the scene.

Then, at last, it ended.

“Someone made it through the ribbon,” Kelli said, “and that was the winner.” She paused, then added, “And the winner got the prize.”

“What prize?”

“Freedom,” Kelli said softly. “The market owner guaranteed it.”

I looked at her, puzzled. “But I thought you said that—”

“Not freedom for himself,” Kelli added quickly. She seemed almost unable to tell me. “But for his youngest child.”

I looked at her wonderingly. “Are you sure about all this?” I asked.

Kelli’s eyes remained on the deep slope of the hill. I had never seen such anger in them. “The market owner had an agreement with an abolitionist society in the North, and they took the child. But the owner was allowed to have the race only a couple of times, because the state legislature outlawed it. They called it a ‘despicable and unnatural display.’ ”

“Which it was.”

“There was even talk of having the market owner arrested,” Kelli went on, “but since he’d arranged to transport the child out of Alabama before freeing it, he hadn’t really broken any laws.”

It was a harrowing tale, and for a moment I sat silently, my mind whirling with the images Kelli’s description had conjured up, the breathless flight, a dozen men pressing relentlessly up the murderous slope, fighting and struggling forward at the same time, clawing at the earth and at each other, their own minds no doubt filled with the terrible prize that lay ahead.

“And so they called it Breakheart Hill,” Kelli said. “And after the war, the Negroes began having their meetings here once a year.”

“Only this time they gave the winner a bundle of cloth that was supposed to represent his child.”

Kelli nodded slowly. “Giving it back to him,” she said.

I glanced down the hill and felt a terrible sense of outrage at what had happened there, at the cruel genius that had conceived it, the crowds who’d watched it, the contradictory atmospheres of both festival and suffering that must have washed over it on those distant summer days. A great sense of purpose suddenly seized me, naive, no doubt, but absolutely genuine, a need to right this ancient wrong, to redress its still abiding grievance, to take Choctaw into the future. I thought of the old Negro cemetery again, bleak in its poverty and abandonment, and of the freezing line of demonstrators who’d seemed so pitiable to me that night in Gadsden but who now seemed part of a great renewal, fierce and united, a transforming power. And in that instant, brief as it turned out to be, I think I probed the outer wall of that moral greatness that Kelli had spoken of months before, became, for the first time in my life, larger than I appeared to be. “We’ll tell the whole story in the Wildcat,” I said resolutely. “We’ll let everybody in Choctaw know what happened here.”

Kelli walked over to the crest of the hill and stood facing out over the valley.

I started to say more, but the stillness in her face stopped me.

She continued to look out over the crest of the hill for a few seconds longer, then turned to face me. I knew that she would never in her life be more beautiful than she was at that moment, that her hair would never be more luxuriously tangled, her skin more darkly radiant, the moral gravity in her eyes more deep and thrilling.

She’d left the camera on a stone not far away, and impulsively I leaned over and picked it up.

“Do you want to take some pictures?” I asked.

She shook her head mutely.

“I’d like to take just one,” I insisted. “Do you mind?”

“No,” she said, then waited while I brought the camera to my eye, focused carefully and snapped the picture that I last saw in Sheriff Stone’s enormous hand.

WE LINGERED ON THE HILL AFTER I TOOK KELLI’S PICTURE. Kelli’s mood continued to be quite somber. She talked quietly about how she intended to write her article for the last issue of the paper, what she hoped to accomplish by it. She talked, too, about Lyle Gates, and even apologized for the way she’d acted at Cuffy’s. “I should have just talked to him,” she told me, “but when he started talking about ‘niggers,’ I guess it just sent me over the edge.”

“Forget about what happened with Lyle,” I told her, although, of course, that was the last thing I wanted her to forget about, since it had unexpectedly afforded me a cherished opportunity to play the hero, one I wanted her to remember forever.

Toward four in the afternoon, it began to grow somewhat chilly, and we decided to leave the hill.

“Do you have to go home now?” I asked as we drove back down toward Choctaw, “or could we go to my house and maybe sit on the porch for a while?”

Kelli smiled. “No, I don’t have to go home right now.”

And so we went to my house instead. I fixed us a couple of sandwiches, and we ate them in the kitchen, then walked out onto the front porch and sat down in the swing.

Kelli wore her sweater out onto the porch, though only draped lightly over her shoulders, like a cape.

“It’s nice out here,” she said as she leaned back. “Do you sit out here a lot?”

“In the summer, I do.”

“With your father?”

“Mostly by myself.”

She lifted her hand to brush back a stray curl, and her ring glinted slightly in the porch light.

“That’s pretty,” I told her.

“It was my grandfather’s,” Kelli told me.

I smiled. “A family heirloom.”

“When my grandmother gave it to me, she said I should keep it until I had ‘given myself’ to someone.” She laughed at the quaintness of her grandmother’s expression. “I guess she meant my husband.” She shrugged. “So I guess that’s what I’ll do.”

“Why didn’t she give it to your mother?” I asked.

The question seemed to darken Kelli’s mood. “I guess she thought my mother wouldn’t need it. Of course, I’m not sure I’ll ever need it either,” she added with a light chuckle.

“Sure you will, Kelli,” I told her.

“Maybe so,” Kelli murmured. She shivered slightly and turned away again. When she looked back toward me, I could tell that the chill had begun to get to her.

“When you’re cold, your lips turn purple,” I said. Then I reached up and moved to touch them with one extended finger.

Her response was a subtle gesture, hardly noticeable except to me. And yet, it was precisely in response to me that she made it. It was a quick flinching away from my slightest touch, and I immediately recognized it for exactly what it was, an absolute physical withdrawal from me, a rejection so spontaneous and complete that I hastily pulled back my hand and sunk it into my lap.

Kelli seemed hardly to have noticed what she’d done, but I saw it again and again as we sat together for the next few minutes, she talking on about this and that, I sinking into an inconceivable blackness. I had never in my life reached out toward her or anyone else in that way. To be so totally rebuffed in so hesitant an approach filled me with an inexpressible sense of self-loathing. I looked at my hands, and hated their short, pudgy fingers. I hated my glasses and the washed-out brown of my hair. I loathed the line of freckles on my arms, and the murky green-gray color of my eyes. I hated every smell and tone and texture of my body. In everything, I felt ugly and unworthy and inconceivably repulsive, a grotesque little frog that no kiss could ever transform into a prince.

Sitting beside me, Kelli saw not a glimmer of all this. She had pulled away slightly from a finger she did not want to touch her lips. She had done it reflexively and inoffensively, in the middle of a sentence that she continued without a break, her voice pouring over me as I drew my hand away and sunk back into the swing, sitting there in silence while she went on about something I have long since forgotten.

She talked for quite a while that night, and I must have seemed a very good listener, though I was no longer listening at all. I heard her voice only as a murmur in the background, saw her face only in the hazy blur of something infinitely distant. For in a sense, she was no longer a young girl in herself, but only the aching symbol of my own devastating inadequacy.

And yet, despite all these tumultuous feelings, I managed to hold myself in check that night. Using every ounce of will, I chatted on with her while we sat together in the swing, then drove her home and waited for her to disappear into the house. But unlike other nights, I did not linger in the driveway in hope of getting a last glance at her figure as it moved past a lighted window. To have done so would have been to hold on to something that I knew had escaped me. And so I left as fast as I could, driving through the surrounding darkness, emptily recalling the movements of a love that now seemed as lost as I was. I felt gutted, my insides scooped out and thrown aside, and later that night, in a strange, forbidding dream, I saw Kelli hovering over me in the airless darkness of my room, her eyes pupilless and unlighted, her hair a dark tangle of vine and forest bramble, an object of romantic dream that had become romantic nightmare.