Breakheart Hill

by Thomas H. Cook

  “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.

  CHAPTER 16

  SOMETIMES IT COMES BACK TO ME ON WORDS THAT ARE themselves ominous: Did you hear what happened to Lyle Gates? But at other times they are ordinary, inconsequential words, and said outside the context of my later memory, they would hold no portent at all, as when I suddenly hear Miss Carver’s voice rising out of nowhere: Now we are moving toward the end.

  It was late spring when she said those words, and much of the approaching summer’s later radiance already colored the mountainside. She had raised the window of the classroom, and I remember that it had groaned a bit before it opened, as if trying to hold on to the sense of stopped time that had hung over us
during that long, cold winter.

  She’d turned back toward us when the job was done, slapped her hands together with a smile and announced, “Well, spring has now officially arrived at Choctaw High.” A few of the students had smiled back at her, and seeing the looks of anticipation on their faces, she’d added, “So as far as the school year is concerned, now we are moving toward the end.”

  Moving toward it, yes, but we had not reached it yet, as many of our teachers made clear that same day. Mr. Arlington sternly reminded us that we all had to complete a research paper before the end of the term. Other teachers pointed out similarly unpleasant realities. As for Miss Carver, she announced that the school play would be Romeo and Juliet, then assigned the last book of the year, Ethan Frome. There was a copy of that book on the shelf in Miss Carver’s room when I visited her for the last time. Her own doctor was on vacation, and so the hired companion who lived with her called me in his place. “I heard she taught you when you were at Choctaw High,” she said in explanation when I appeared at the door.

  I nodded, and the woman led me through the corridor to the back bedroom, where Miss Carver lay in her bed. Her hair was long and white, but very thin, so that I could see the pink flesh of her scalp as I leaned over to check her pulse.

  “She had a rough spell last night,” the woman told me. “I was afraid she’d come down with another stroke.”

  “Has she been sleeping long?” I asked.

  “About three hours, I’d say,” the woman answered. “She raved a little last night, too. Crazy talk, like she does sometimes.”

  I nodded and prepared to take her blood pressure.

  The woman shook her head. “Poor old thing,” she said. “Don’t hardly nobody come to see her.”

  It was then that I remembered Miss Carver as she’d appeared on that spring day in 1962, smiling to a group of students she’d finally won over, breathing in the fresh warm air, mentioning the school play to Kelli as she’d headed out the door at the end of class, You’d be just right for Juliet.

  They had become rather close by then, and years later, as I kneeled at Miss Carver’s bedside, it struck me that Kelli would have visited her often during her long illness, would have relieved her loneliness, made a soup and fed it to her slowly, read to her in the evening from some tale of doomed love, and thereby brightened days she did not live to brighten. And thinking that, it also struck me that some people are not merely brief points of life, but textures within life itself, and that when we take such a person from us, we take not just him or her, but some small piece of everyone they knew or might have known. And I know that years ago if I had been able to sense just that one fragile truth, grasp that single sliver of redeeming light from the smoky darkness that was gathering around me, Kelli would still be with us now.

  BUT I COULD NOT GRASP ANYTHING BUT MY OWN CORROSIVE pain, and so, as the days passed, I grew increasingly remote, even sullen. Kelli noticed it, of course, and she made gentle attempts to find out what was wrong. My answer was always the same, a quick shrug, followed by “I’m okay.”

  But I was not okay. I was in romantic agony. Every thought of Kelli simultaneously inflamed and chilled me. I could not sit in the same classroom with her without being overwhelmed by the most terrible sense of worthlessness. I thought of her constantly, and was constantly in pain. At times, when we worked together in the basement, I could feel the air thickening around me, dense and suffocating. It was an agitation that electrified every sight of her, lent a charge to every sound she made. Everything was either utterly barren or inexpressibly piercing. I could not stand her voice, or even the sight of her in the hallway, and yet, at the same time, I yearned for every glimpse of her. In her presence, and particularly when I drove her home each afternoon, I felt as if I were bleeding from every pore, and there were moments, when she would glance toward me and smile quietly, as if urging me to tell her what was wrong, when I wanted to pull the car over to the side of the road and set out across the open field, reeling and bellowing like a stricken animal. It was beyond description, beyond consolation, beyond hope.

  It was also in almost perfect contrast to the way Kelli lived during what Luke has forever insisted upon calling her “last days.” For as I became increasingly more sullen and enclosed, biting down on my pain, she became livelier, more self-assured and expansive, casting off the last vestiges of her “new girl” status. She talked eagerly to whatever student approached her, became more aggressive in her classroom comments and even kidded the small knot of “tough guys” who smoked in the parking lot after school. She wrote the story of Breakheart Hill and Mr. Arlington reluctantly told her that it was good enough to meet his research paper assignment. She also wrote two new poems, both of them somewhat less ominous than those she’d previously written, less guarded and unsure. “She was blooming,” Luke said to me years later, “like the spring.”

  I can remember very well when he said it. We were driving home from Miss Troy’s funeral, its somberness still reflected in Luke’s eyes.

  “One thing has always bothered me,” he said. “Kelli didn’t have a thing with her when she got out of my truck that day.”

  I nodded, but said nothing.

  “You know how she always had something with her,” Luke added. “A book, I mean. Always.”

  “Yes.”

  “But not that time, Ben,” Luke said. “And that’s always made me think that Kelli had something in mind when she went up there that day.”

  As he spoke I saw the black wheels of the car as they ground up the old mining road, snapping vines and crushing twigs and blowing leaves behind them until they finally came to a dusty halt at the base of Breakheart Hill.

  “But why would she have gone up there?” Luke asked.

  I saw the car door swing open, two feet lower themselves onto the dusty rut, pause a moment, then move forward determinedly, step by anguished step.

  “Of course, Sheriff Stone always thought that she’d gone up there to meet somebody,” Luke added. “Somebody who had a reason to hurt her, I guess.”

  The feet disappeared into the green, but I could still hear them rustling through the thick undergrowth, moving more slowly now as they mounted the upper slope of Breakheart Hill.

  “Who did he think that might be, Luke?” I asked coolly.

  Luke’s eyes drifted away from my even stare.

  “Who, Luke?” I repeated, this time more insistently. “Did he say who he thought it was she was going to meet that afternoon?”

  Still Luke did not turn toward me, and for a single chilling instant I believed that he was actually going to spin around suddenly and say it to my face, You, Ben. He thought she was going to meet you.

  But he didn’t do that. Instead, his eyes drifted back to me slowly, almost reluctantly. “I don’t know,” he said. He shook his head, as if trying to drive the mystery from it. “She was blooming, like the spring,” he added. “You could see it in her eyes.”

  Her eyes appeared to me instantly, and I saw the same luminous energy that Luke had spoken of so clearly that for a moment I found myself unable to imagine them in any other way, and certainly not lightless and uncomprehending, floating without direction, vacant and disengaged, as they had been when they’d looked up at me for the last time.

  But even more impressive than the immense energy that flowed from Kelli that spring were the varied uses she found for it. She helped Sheila Cameron begin work on the prom, tutored Noreen in algebra and even submitted a few line drawings for the final issue of the Wildcat. “Just something I thought I’d try,” she explained as she handed them to me.

  But most surprising of all, Kelli decided to heed Miss Carver’s request and go out for the part of Juliet in the upcoming school play.

  The audition was held in the auditorium, and several girls, including Mary Diehl and Sheila Cameron, showed up to try out for the part. Earlier that morning, Kelli had rather pointedly asked me to go with her. “I’d like you to tell me how I did,” she expla
ined. I didn’t want to do it, but I could find no way out that would not have ended in a frantic and probably tearful confession of wounded love, so I took a seat near the center of the auditorium and glumly watched as each girl recited various lines from the play.

  Mary went first, her long, dark hair pouring over her shoulders as she recited Juliet’s balcony speech with an undiminished southern accent. Miss Carver had arranged to have a spotlight narrow in on each of the contenders, and I remember that Mary looked oddly imprisoned in it, a hoop of yellow light encircling her delicately, but confiningly as well, so that, had I been all-knowing, I might have glimpsed her future in an instant of foreshadowed doom.

  Sheila Cameron came next. As she recited Juliet’s death scene, the same spotlight that had tightened around Mary like a noose appeared to hold her in a warm embrace. Her blond hair glowing in its light, she let her arms sweep out and reach for her imagined Romeo, calling to him softly but with the kind of inner strength that suggested those depths of character and endurance her later life would prove.

  At last it was Kelli’s turn. I noticed that as she walked across the stage, Miss Carver leaned forward slightly, watching her intently, and with a sense of anticipation she had not shown for the other girls.

  Kelli stopped at the center of the stage, turned and looked out over the nearly empty theater. The spotlight opened around her, and for a moment she stood in silence, taking a single dramatic pause before she began.

  As it turned out, she had not chosen one of the more famous of Juliet’s speeches, but a relatively obscure one, given to a friar, and which ended with a few words I have read a thousand times since then:

  Or bid me go into a new-made grave,

  And hide me with a dead man in his shroud,

  Things that to hear them told have made me tremble …

  When she’d finished, I got up and eased myself into the center aisle. The auditorium was nearly empty, but as I glanced back toward the door I could see a single figure, seated in the far right corner of the room, slouched uncharacteristically low in his seat, his football jacket hung loosely over the chair in front of him. I nodded toward him, but he did not see me. His attention was focused on someone else entirely. At first I assumed that he’d come to see Mary do her recitation, but as I watched Todd’s eyes follow Kelli off the stage, then up the aisle toward where I stood waiting for her as patiently as ever, I was not so sure.