by Billy Coffey
“No, Daddy,” Zach said.
“I’m going,” Kate told me. “This is because of me, Jake. Lucy’s with him.”
“You have to stay here with Zach.”
“No, Daddy,” Zach said again. He had his eyes to the yearbook and gave the Devereauxs only a passing glance. “You hafta go. Mommy too. He told me so. Mr. Hollis and Miss Edith can take care of me.”
“Son,” I said, “we’re not going anywhere.”
“You hafta, Daddy. Don’t be scared.”
I looked to Kate. “I’m not doing this.”
“Then I’m doing it alone,” she said.
She went to Zach and covered his face and neck with kisses. He stood strong and let her cry, then pressed his head against my vanishing waist.
“Don’t be scared,” he whispered.
Kate stood at the door, aware that her courage would flee if she didn’t leave soon. I took my hat and told Zach, “We won’t be long now. You mind Hollis and Edith.”
Zach wiped his cheek. He reached for Bessie and handed her to me. “He said you’d need this.”
Zach and Hollis stood at the door, watching as we left. Our son held his head high, but that only betrayed the tremble in his chin. Kate took a long look at him. She waved in a way that made me feel it was a kind of good-bye.
As I pulled from the lane onto the road, I could not look back for the same reason. I was afraid looking back and seeing Zach at the door would mean I wouldn’t come back or Kate wouldn’t. All those songs and stories say you should always say good-bye and I love you before going anywhere. Because you never know. You might get in a wreck or have a heart attack, or just down the road’s when that aneurism you didn’t know you had finally decides to pop like a squashed bug. But I wanted to lie to myself just one more time. I wanted to believe where Kate and I were going was no more dangerous than taking a drive down into town. I wanted to believe it was all going to be fine even if I knew it wasn’t.
To me, life was a wheel that starts turning at birth. Slow and rocking at first, faster as we get on. Always moving from a start that gets dimmer to an end that comes nearer. And at that end? I think there’s just a single door that opens to either eternal bliss or punishing torment. I could avoid that end no more than anyone else who’d ever breathed life into their lungs. One day I, too, would have to turn that knob. But how I got to that door and what was waiting on the other side? That was up to me. God knew, but He let me choose. Life might be a straight shot from yesterday through today and on to tomorrow, but that wheel spun by, coming back to a place it had already been. And that was where we all chose our fate—there along that slow grind.
I knew someone would die that night. Me or Kate or Taylor or Lucy. Someone. But when Zach told me he’d seen Phillip, I understood that I didn’t have a choice but to go. My life had stuck like a bad needle on a record because I’d always had it in my head that I could go back and undo what I’d done. Part of that was true. I could go back; I often did. But none of us can write a new beginning to our story. All we can do is start a new end.
That alone was what took me back to the Hollow. That alone was what kept me from turning back even as I met Kate’s stare and knew her eyes looked not at me but at a time long gone. I trusted that hope for a new end to carry us even as I felt that wheel spin around and back. Back to the day Phillip McBride died in body, and Kate, Taylor, and I died in spirit.
Part VI
Settling Accounts
1
It is May 25, 1990, and there is a sweetness in the air like fresh life. The mountains stand so clear and close they seem to have uprooted themselves and taken a ten-mile step nearer to town. The sun is bright and hot—close, Kate remembers. Yes, closer even than the mountains. She shields her eyes against that glare and looks out beyond the crowded football field to those blue peaks, thinking this is how the future looks. Clear. Clear and bright.
It’s Field Day, the day after final exams and mere days until graduation, and the faculty of Mattingly High School has thrown up its collective hands and surrendered to summer’s call. Three hundred teenagers spread out along the track and football field, some sunning themselves in the home and visitors’ bleachers, others seeking shelter beneath the peeling scoreboard or entertaining themselves at the booths and refreshment stands the Student Government Association has erected at the fifty-yard line. What teachers who have bothered to attend are huddled in metal folding chairs in the far end zone, sharing summer plans and how glad they are to have survived another year.
Kate is holding court in the visitors’ bleachers, gossiping with the crowd around her about who has done what to whom and when and for how long. There is talk of prospects and plans. A few of her friends have been accepted to the university, a few more to smaller colleges nearer and farther from town. Most, however, will remain in Mattingly. They will find work in the shops along Main Street, marrying and having children. Kate wants both of these worlds. She will stay in Mattingly and try the community college in Stanley and see what happens.
She hears Jake before she sees him, down on the field in the middle of a crowd at the bottle toss. Two baseballs rest in his left hand, one sits in his right. Jake draws his arm back and forward in a blur, and in the next instant Kate hears the echoing smack of bottles tumbling and people cheering. Everyone cheers but one. Trevor Morgan stands in the midst of his fellow students with his hands in his pockets.
Kate watches Jake and remembers that day in second grade when he saved her honor at Bobby Barnes’s expense. She remembers the card she made for him five years later, when Jake’s mother took ill and passed on. Their lives have crossed many times since, as all lives cross in a small town. And though Kate knows neither when nor how, she believes their lives are destined to cross once more, and this time their hearts will entwine.
The bleachers are full. There are good friends and friends Kate knows only in passing, all of whom have found themselves drawn here to rest and remember. To be with one another, if perhaps for the last time. Chatter dies slowly. Laughter calms and wilts. It’s as though each of them is looking down upon more than a football field, they are looking down upon the most important parts of their young lives. And Kate believes these people—these friends—have each come to the end of the same long thought: this is a beginning, and this is an end. For Kate Griffith, it means the end of being the popular one, the pretty one, the leader and the trendsetter. There will be no fawning over her at the community college, no one vying for her attention. She will be a face, nothing more.
She looks down over the field and sees two boys, each apart from one another and everyone else. One sits cross-legged in the grass, his pimply face and spectacled eyes deep in a book. The other stands leaning against the goal post. His long hair blows in the breeze and his hands are shoved into a pair of filthy jeans. Kate knows one of them—Phillip McBride is his name, Phil the Fairy to both his classmates and, in hushed whispers, most of the faculty—but she does not know the other. Nor does she care. Because the mountains now seem to have retreated and the sun has grown dark and distant, and Kate does not need to know either of those two boys to hate them. To her they’ve become warnings of what her own future holds. She will be forgotten. Ignored. Kate has ascended to teenaged greatness (at least by Mattingly’s standards) without even trying, but now that she has it she finds it hard to give away. In that moment, too hard.
She speaks up then, and the place from where those words come is neither a soul full of malice nor the cold heart of a bully, it is only from a frightened girl who wants to hang on to the little she has. And for all the times Kate has looked back on this moment to what she did, this is the first time she remembers why.
She only wants to keep mattering.
“Let’s play a trick,” she says.
Heads turn around her. Frowns lift. And just as in all those times in all those years before, every one of Kate Griffith’s adorers says amen.
She slips down the bleachers. Kate goes to Phillip first, as he is
closest. Kate turns to look back at the bleachers (even now she hears pockets of sniggers) and feels her ponytail whip against the side of her neck and the sun against her tight jeans. She skirts the football field toward Phillip, whose nose is still in his book. His eyes wander up when the first edges of Kate’s shadow touches his knee. Kate sees Phillip’s chest tighten when he realizes it’s her. He blinks twice, and Kate knows she made him do that. She relishes that power. She grips it and holds tight and vows to never let it go.
“Hey there, Phillip,” she says. “What’cha reading?”
His tongue slips from his mouth and over his lips, wetting them. “Shakespeare,” he tells her.
“Well, now’s not the time for homework, silly.”
“I know,” Phillip says. His voice comes out shrill and high, like a chipmunk’s. “I like it. It’s pretty.”
“Read me some.”
Phillip grins—This is happening, Kate believes he’s thinking, this is really happening—and settles upon a page. He clears his throat and pushes his glasses toward his nose.
“ ‘Take, O take those lips away, That so sweetly were forsworn, And those eyes, the break of day, Lights that do not mislead the morn: But my kisses bring again, Bring again—Seals of love, but seal’d in vain, Seal’d in vain!’ ”
Kate brings a hand to her mouth. Phillip looks upon the smile she hides with a kind of awe.
“That’s pretty, Phillip,” she says. “I don’t know what any of that means, but it sounds fair.”
“I didn’t write it,” he says.
“You’ve crushed on me for a long time, haven’t you?” Kate asks.
Phillip’s mouth falls open, making her laugh again.
“It’s okay,” she says. “I’ve crushed on you too. Never could tell you that. You know how people here are. But we’ll be graduating soon, Phillip. You live in the hills, I live here in town. We might not ever see each other again. So I was thinking now’s the time to do all those things we’ve never been able.”
She sees Phillip knows this is true—that in fact he may have been thinking that very thing over the past weeks. Yet fear pinches his lips closed.
“Phillip,” she says, “do you want to kiss me?”
He does not speak but his eyes say, Yes, yes, and yes please, and his head manages a nod.
“Come on,” Kate says. “Let’s go somewhere private.”
She leads Phillip away, back toward the bleachers where fifty heads have turned in the opposite direction. The two of them step onto the track and to the other side. Phillip stops. There is a moment of panic when Kate fears he knows something is wrong, that a pretty her would never want to kiss an ugly him. She turns around, meaning to tell Phillip to hurry, Field Day’s almost over and this will be his only chance and doesn’t he want this moment just as badly as she?
But there is no need for such falsehood. Phillip has only bent to the soft grass and plucked a handful of flowers. He holds them up, offering them, and Kate can barely contain her laughter because they’re not flowers at all, they’re
(“Dandelions,” she said.
Jake took his eyes off the dark road that led to the mountains and asked, “What’d you say?”
Kate only muttered, “That’s why I hate them now, because they remind me of me,” and she fell silent again.)
Kate takes the weeds and thanks him. Phillip reaches out and takes her hand. His fingers are slippery and his breaths come out heavy. He says, “If you let go, I’ll float into the sun.”
Afternoon light bathes the backside of the bleachers. Phillip looks up to see legs but no eyes. There is chatter and laughter and the metallic ring of feet upon stairs, and Kate thinks if she doesn’t hurry someone will falter, someone will squeal, someone always does. Sweat covers Phillip’s face. He pushes his glasses up.
“I have to go make sure no one sees,” Kate says. “You wouldn’t want to be the one to spoil my honor, would you, Phillip?”
“No, not ever.”
“Good. You wait here. Close your eyes. It’ll be better that way. But don’t peek. If you peek, I’ll know and you won’t get a kiss. Okay?”
“Okay,” Phillip says.
“Good. Close them now. Shut them tight. I’ll be right back.”
His glasses slip down. Phillip lets them hang. Kate smiles as she walks away, sure he will wait. For her, Phillip McBride would wait forever. She waits until his eyes are closed and runs, tossing the dandelions as far beneath the bleachers as she can.
2
“I’m looking toward the Holler on that day.”
Taylor looked from the fire he’d built to Lucy. An orange glow colored her face, and though the night was warm and the flames burned hot, she huddled close. The rocks laid by hands that were not his own towered over them. Those stones frightened Taylor. They frightened him more than anything had in his life.
“I’m only a child, lady, no older’n you, but I’ve wandered this Holler often. Fashioned my flint knife in this wood just the week before. This land begins toward the hill lands in Mattingly and ends in the hill lands of Camden, as you may know. Where it ends is where I lived with my aunt. Charlene’s her name. She says the devil lives in this wood, and I think to myself mayhap he does or doesn’t, but it don’t matter because the devil’s more a friend to me than anyone else. It draws me, this Holler. As the Hole draws you now.
“So there I stand on that warm day, walled in by boys and girls who are my age in body but only children to me in mind. I don’t know them and they don’t know me and we all agree that way is best. I don’t like Mattingly. It stinks of corn and cows. I’m just a ghost there. I come to school and no one speaks to Taylor, no one sees Taylor, no one knows Taylor. So I stand against those poles that day while everybody’s playin’. I feel this flint knife in my pocket and look out over the mountains to where this Holler lies. I count my minutes until I’m free of that school and can run here.
“That’s when I sense her coming. Sashaying her way through that bright green football grass. And though my eyes are still on that wide patch of dead trees midway up the mountains, I know it’s Kate Griffith who walks my way. She don’t know of me but I know of her, and I know of Jake. Them two see the school as I come to see this Holler, and by that I mean as their own. She’s grinning as she nears, like she sees my own heart set to fluttering. I always thought Kate is fair. Her eyes are like evening, and I feel if I stroll there, I will stroll forever.
“She helloes and asks my name, but my tongue’s too knotted to speak. She chuckles (like birdsong, that titter is) and says it don’t matter if I talk or not. She says she’s watched me all day. I doubt that in my head—a ghost is all I am, and even those who see ghosts see them as there for a blink and then there no more—but my heart says, No, Taylor, don’t you go thinking that right yet, you just let me feel some for a while.
“Then she says, ‘Would you like to kiss me?’ and I near crumble at her feet.
“She takes my hand and leads me longways past the teachers and the kids, back to where the bleachers sit. We’re close there, and she turns and hushes me.
“ ‘Be quiet and close your eyes,’ she whispers, and then she says it’s unmanly to kiss a girl otherwise.
“There’s a voice in me that speaks then, telling me to never mind what she says, that something’s wrong about a girl as pretty as that kissin’ a boy whose name she don’t even know. But another voice, this one louder, hushes that speech with a fire that shuts my eyes tight. I mean to have Kate’s lips, my heart says.
“She leads me stumbling behind the bleachers. There’s talkin’ everywhere, people laughing, having a grand old time. And then it’s like the world hushes.
“Kate stops me and whispers, ‘Come here.’
“I lean in and meet her mouth, and there’s a softness that steals my breath and weakens my knees. But I know it’s only for a moment, that feeling. It don’t matter a whit how good anything is, all things fade. But to see her! To hold that picture in my mind. I t
hink that would last me forever. So I open my eyes.”
Taylor stopped there. Lucy’s gaze fixed to his. He shuddered despite the heat of the fire.
“What?” she asked. “What happened, Taylor?”
He said, “I open my eyes, and it’s not Kate’s lips upon mine. ’Tis a boy’s.”
3
Kate sensed the thick night as Jake stopped the Blazer. They both climbed out. Jake stood at the rusty gate, tracing the names scratched into the iron with his fingers. His lips moved, but Kate couldn’t hear if he was speaking to her or himself. The noise was too great. Not in the woods (even then there was only silence, as if both sides of the gate were caught in an inhale and waiting to breathe out), but in her own mind. It was the sharp sound of—
4
—Laughter! Rolling down from behind the bleachers like a waterfall, spilling onto Kate like cool rain on a hot day, joyous bursting, cackling voices of friends and friends in passing, howling and teary and jubilant, faces turned and pointed to the boys—the two poor HILL BOYS—locked in an amorous kiss.
Kate wails with glee, drowning herself in the hilarity. The dirty boy—Kate will not know his name is Taylor until twenty years later—has already opened his eyes. He steps back in a grimace and swipes at his mouth, which only makes them laugh more. Phil the Fairy jumps when the laughter starts, his eyes wide at the sight of where his lips had rested. There is no shock to him, no horror, and upon seeing him as such, Kate feels the first fringes of a fog that will damper her life from this moment on. Phillip McBride looks as one who has woken from a dream he knew was too good to be true.
They run, each of them. Phillip one way and the dirty boy the other, pushed by the mocking at their backs through the exits on either side of the football field.
Aside from Kate and those on the bleachers, no one sees them leave. It’s just as well; no one had ever noticed them before, and only Phillip would be remembered after because only Phillip died.
