Breakheart Hill

CHAPTER 20

MORE THAN EVER OVER THE LAST FEW DAYS, IT HAS RETURNED to me in the sound of an ax blade whirring in the air, and of Luke’s voice directly after that. Did you hear what happened to Lyle Gates?

Even as he said it, so matter-of-factly, I heard all the other questions he has asked through the years, all his unspoken doubts like a chorus in my mind. Luke believes that there is something missing in the case the prosecution brought against Lyle Gates, something missing in the motive Mr. Bailey offered the jury to explain what happened on Breakheart Hill.

And so he has not forgotten Lyle, nor his own testimony at the trial, nor mine, nor even the dramatic way Edith Sparks pointed Lyle out as the man she’d seen coming out of the woods that day, her finger trembling in the charged atmosphere of Judge Thompson’s courtroom, her voice barely carrying as far as the jury box, so that she’d had to repeat her answer, saying it harshly the second time, and in a voice that carried outrage as well as testimony: Him.

But more than anything, Luke has not forgotten the look on my face as he struggled to tell me what he’d seen on Breakheart Hill. He has not forgotten the dead eyes that greeted him, the tightly closed mouth, the utter stillness that enveloped me, and that even as he tried to tell me, suggested I already knew. And I know that it is a face that has surfaced many times in his mind over the years, like a corpse suddenly given up by the river.

And so there was something darkly suggestive in the way he posed the question that afternoon, the words coming slowly, heavily, as if hung with weights. Did you hear what happened to Lyle Gates?

I shook my head almost casually, revealing no hint of the pang I suddenly felt at the mention of his name. “No, I haven’t heard anything about Lyle,” I answered.

It was late on a fall afternoon, and Luke had dropped by my office as he often did, though on this occasion he had no doubt been urged there by what he’d just learned. “Well, you knew he’d been brought to the prison farm, didn’t you?” he asked.

Two years before, the local paper had noted that after twenty years in the state penitentiary, Lyle had been moved to a prison farm near Choctaw to serve the rest of his sentence. His mother was ailing, the article said, and she had petitioned the Board of Prisons to have Lyle moved closer to her so that she could continue to visit him without having to endure the hardship of a long journey. The board had granted Mrs. Gates’s petition, and Lyle had subsequently been transferred to a prison farm in the northern part of the county. I had neither heard nor read anything about him since that time. So that Luke’s question, when it came, struck me with the suddenness of a gust of wind.

“Yes, I knew he was at the prison farm. But that’s the last I’ve heard about him.”

“Well, they killed him yesterday, Ben,” Luke said.

I felt my lips part in a stunned whisper, but no sound emerged.

Luke sat in the chair in front of my desk, his eyes trained on mine. “Killed him,” he repeated. “Shot him down.”

“Who?”

“Well, to tell you the truth, from the way it sounds, he sort of killed himself.”

I stood up, walked to the window and looked out. To the right, I could see the old courthouse standing in its grave severity atop a flight of cement stairs. I remembered how I’d stood on those stairs years before, stood in the driving rain with my father next to me, the two of us watching as Lyle passed by, so very small, as he had seemed, against the enormous gray monolith of Sheriff Stone.

“Suicide, that’s what I’d call it,” Luke went on. “I mean, he didn’t give the guards much choice.” He drew the newspaper from beneath his arm and dropped it on my desk. “It’s all in there,” he said. “You can read it when you get a chance.”

I nodded, my eyes still locked on the old courthouse, the sternly accusing look of its high stone walls.

“You know, Ben,” Luke said, “I never could figure out why Lyle would do something like that.”

I heard Mr. Bailey’s voice echoing through the years: Only hate can do a thing like this.

“I know what they said it was,” Luke said. “That Lyle wanted to get back at Kelli for treating him the way she had that day at Cuffy’s. But that was weeks before, Ben. That was old business as far as Lyle was concerned.”

I offered nothing, said nothing.

“Of course it could have been that he was all fired up by that stuff Kelli wrote in the Wildcat,” Luke said. He fell silent, and I knew that he was reconsidering it all again, going through the old details, chewing on the questions that still plagued him. “But to attack a young girl the way he did? I don’t know, Ben. Lyle never seemed mean enough for something like that. I mean, the way Kelli treated him at Cuffy’s, that would have made him mad, but not that mad.”

I kept my eyes on the far mountain, its shadowy ridges growing darker as night fell. In my mind I saw Lyle stalking through the dense green undergrowth, his eyes searching for the girl he’d seen in Luke’s truck, the one who’d insulted him in full view of the men he worked with on the road, an affront whose depth, as I believed at the time, even he could not have imagined as he’d stood, thunderstruck, in Cuffy’s Grill that day.

“I guess there’ll always be a few things in life we’ll never know,” Luke said.

I returned to my chair and eased myself into it. “I guess so,” I told him softly, wearily, as if all the years had fallen upon me, depositing in one great load their full, enormous weight.

He looked at me tenderly. “You’ve never gotten over it, have you, Ben?” he asked.

I shook my head. “No.”

“Me neither, in a way,” Luke said. “Probably a few others, too.”

I said nothing, but only let my eyes drift down toward the newspaper, my mind slowly repeating the names of all the others who had never gotten over it: Todd. Mary. Raymond. Sheila and Rosie. Noreen. Perhaps countless others down through time.

Luke shrugged. “Well, got to go. The boys are in from college tonight, so we’re making a big family barbecue.” He stood, walked to the door, then turned back. “You and Noreen want to drop by later, have some ribs?”

“No, thank you.”

“Well, take it easy, then.” He offered a faint smile before he stepped out of my office, carefully closing the door behind him.

I glanced down at the paper, reluctant to read what was in it, afraid of the surging blackness that would overwhelm me.

And so I waited until long after Luke had left my office before I finally leaned forward and spread the paper out across my desk. There was a picture of Lyle near the bottom of the front page. He was dressed in prison clothes, a figure slumped on a metal bed that had been attached to a bare cement wall. The years had added a dreadful puffiness to his face. His hair had darkened, and there were deep lines at his eyes, but more than anything I noticed the puzzlement in his face. He looked like a child asking a teacher to clear up some confusing point in math or science, unable to go on without an answer.

The article beneath the picture was no more than a few paragraphs, and it related exactly what had happened to him.

It had occurred in the middle of the previous afternoon. Lyle had been working with a road crew sent out from the prison farm to cut the tall grasses that grew along the state highway to the north. He’d been digging with a pickax, struggling to uproot a stubborn patch of kudzu, when he’d suddenly stopped, raised the pickax and begun to swing it over his head. The guards had surrounded him quickly, but he’d refused to drop the ax. Instead, he’d swung it ever more wildly, sending bits of grass and clay flying in all directions from its whirring blades before he’d abruptly lunged toward them so quickly that they’d “acted in their own defense,” as the paper put it, and fired upon him.

As I read, I saw all of it as if it were a film unspooling in my mind: Lyle ripping at the thick, resisting vine, the sweat running in grimy streams down his arms and back, darkening what remained of his blond hair. Suddenly his eyes narrow, his teeth clench, his fingers tighten around the handle of the ax, and I know that it has all come back to him in a terrible rush, the harsh words he’d so thoughtlessly spoken at Cuffy’s, Luke’s truck whizzing past him as he’d trudged up the mountain road, Edith Sparks’s accusing finger, the jury’s verdict and then that long walk down the courthouse steps, the rain pelting down upon him like small gray stones.

And I knew that it was while he’d stood helplessly within the swirl of his memory, dazed by a dark kaleidoscope of images, that he must have decided to end it all.

I hear the whir of the blade as it begins to wheel about in the smoldering air, then the pistol shots that stagger him. Small geysers of blood erupt from his chest. His legs collapse beneath him. The left side of his face slams onto the clay beside the road, one green eye staring lifelessly into the summer woods.

I see all of this, and I think, Will this never end?

LYLE WAS BURIED IN THE TOWN CEMETERY THREE DAYS LATER. A scattering of relatives, all looking faintly ashamed, perhaps even resentful of the darkness he’d brought to their family name, gathered at his grave. An old woman sat in a metal chair, and though time and a long illness had greatly changed her, I saw that it was Lyle’s mother.

I did not approach her, but when the funeral was over and I started to leave, I saw her wave her hand, motioning me toward her.

I walked over to where she sat beneath the shade of a huge oak tree, one of her daughters at her side.

“You’re Dr. Wade, aren’t you?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“I want you to know that I don’t bear you no ill will for what you said about Lyle in court.”

“I appreciate that, Mrs. Gates,” I told her.

“You just told the truth, that’s all.” She smiled softly. “Everybody says you’re a real good man.”

I nodded. “Thank you, ma’am,” I said calmly, but even as I said it, I could feel myself shrinking and drying up. It was a feeling I’d experienced before. I’d felt it the first time I’d noticed bruises on Raymond Jeffries’s small arms and legs, and then again as I’d lifted Rosie Cameron off the stretcher, a weightless sack of broken bones, and realized that she was dead. I’d felt it yet again some years later as I’d looked back and watched Mary Diehl disappear into the same white room where she sits blankly to this day. And later still, I’d felt it when Luke and I had stumbled upon Todd Jeffries as he lay sprawled across the golf course at Turtle Grove. It was a sense of being wholly withered, bones like twigs gathered beneath a dry, crackling skin, and I was doomed to feel it at least once more.

Mrs. Gates smiled quietly, but I could sense something building in her mind. “I guess I have to accept it that Lyle did what everybody says he did,” she said softly. “But it’s hard for a mother to do.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

She shook her head slowly. “I thought I knowed my son, but to this day I can’t figure out why he would have hurt that girl.”

She paused a moment, perhaps reconsidering it all, trying to picture the little boy she’d raised falling viciously upon a young girl in a deep wood. “I just can’t figure why he’d do a thing like that,” she repeated, and with those words I saw Lyle as he’d moved down the courthouse stairs that last day, one of Sheriff Stone’s enormous hands holding almost tenderly his arm, the rain mercilessly battering down upon him, my father’s words beyond his hearing. There’s something missing in that boy. And I remembered how I’d rushed away at that moment, disappearing into the crowd, disappearing from Choctaw, disappearing for hours until night had finally fallen and my father had gone in search of me, gone to Cuffy’s and Luke’s and finally up the mountain to where he’d found me sitting on the crest of Breakheart Hill, drenched and sobbing, his arms wrapping around me comfortingly in the driving rain, urging me to my feet and then back up toward the road, offering me the only words he could. I know how much you loved her, son, thinking that it was grief and only grief that had sent me rushing from the courthouse steps, and never imagining that it might be more.

But it was not my father’s words that sounded over me now, but Mrs. Gates’s words, ragged with age, but passionate. “Lyle wasn’t a mean boy.” She shook her head slowly. “So I just can’t figure out what could have stirred him up so much against that poor girl.”

I heard my mind pronounce the words I still could not bring myself to say: I can.