Breakheart Hill

by Thomas H. Cook

  Afterward, back at our hotel, Noreen and I settled into bed, my arms draped lightly around her shoulders, her head pressed against my chest.

  “Everyone deserves to be loved like Rodin was,” I said thoughtlessly, hoping to do no more than initiate a bit of conversation before we fell asleep.

  Noreen shook her head. “No,” she said firmly. “Everyone wants to be loved like that, but not everyone deserves to be.” For a moment I thought her eyes were glistening, and in that instant I felt the full weight of Breakheart Hill as it had lain upon her shoulders, the long years she had lived beneath the shadow of a love she would never receive from me, but which she knew I had once given—and in some fathomless way still gave—to another. She had lived gallantly without it, but as my wife lay silently beside me that night, I knew that its sharp pang had never left her, that there had not been a single day during the last thirty years when she had not felt its raw, persistent ache.

  But as we pulled into the driveway of Noreen’s house that cold afternoon, neither of us could have known that in talking about Kelli Troy, we were talking about both our joint and our separate destinies.

  Noreen remained in the car for a moment after we came to a halt. She seemed to be thinking about what she should do.

  “I’ll try to talk to Kelli if you want me to,” she said finally.

  I shook my head. “No, you better not,” I told her. “If she wants to keep everything to herself, then I think we should let her.”

  Noreen’s eyes lingered on me. “You’re a nice boy, Ben.” The next words seemed hard for her to say. “I like you.”

  In return, I gave her nothing more than a quick, peremptory nod. “Thanks, Noreen. For everything.”

  A shadow crossed her face. She looked as if she’d been formally dismissed, turned quickly, opened the door and got out of the car. A cold blast had swept down from the mountain, and by the time she reached the front door, she’d folded her collar up against it.

  AFTER THAT, I DIDN’T MENTION KELLI’S CHANGED BEHAVIOR to anyone. So when it was raised again only a week later, it was Miss Carver who raised it. It was a morning in late March, and the same icy wave was still bearing down on Choctaw. I was making my way quickly from my car to the front door of the school, and had nearly made it to the top of the stairs when I heard someone call my name. I turned and saw Miss Carver coming up behind me, her huge brown briefcase hanging like a great weight from her gloved hand.

  “Ben, do you have a minute?” she asked when she reached me.

  I told her I did, then followed her inside. She walked quickly up the stairs to her classroom, placed the briefcase beside her desk and stared directly toward me.

  “Is Kelli still working with you on the Wildcat?” she asked as she pulled off her gloves.

  “Yes.”

  “Have you noticed any change in her attitude lately?”

  I felt uncomfortable discussing such things with a teacher, so I offered her very little. “She seems quieter” was all I said.

  “Has she said anything to you about any trouble she might be having?”

  “No.”

  When I think of that morning now, I am struck by how innocent Miss Carver’s inquiries were, searching but not accusatory, and in that way quite different from the questions she would put to me three months later, her voice tense, guarded, profoundly skeptical, a woman who knew a liar when she saw one.

  “So you have no idea what’s bothering Kelli?”

  I felt embarrassed by my answer. “No, she hasn’t talked to me about anything.”

  Miss Carver nodded, clearly disappointed by my lack of information. “Well, if you do get an idea of what’s bothering her, I hope you’ll tell me.” She looked at me significantly. “A girl like Kelli can get into trouble at this age.”

  I might have interpreted “trouble” in many ways, but by then I’d learned enough about Miss Carver to know the kind of trouble to which she referred. It was not pregnancy and certainly not the “trouble” that plagues young people now, the drugs and violence and grave illness to which they may fall prey. The perils of Miss Carver’s world were all romantic perils, and so by “trouble” she had meant that Kelli was one of those lost ladies we’d all been reading about in her class that year, passionate and gifted, ripe for that particular destruction which lurks at the rim of love.

  But though I knew precisely what Miss Carver had meant by “trouble,” I pretended to be more or less oblivious. “Well, I don’t think she’s in any trouble,” I said.

  Miss Carver looked at me silently. It was a close, evaluating look, as if, even then, she were trying to penetrate the many layers of my deception. It was a look that never left her after that. It was still in her eyes when I saw her for the last time. Her face had grown prematurely old by then, yellow and wrinkled, and I could see her fingers plucking at the steel spokes of her wheelchair like harp strings. Her eyes were profoundly distrustful as she peered at me through the thick lenses of her glasses, and when she finally spoke, her voice was full of dire suspicions: You’re not Dr. Winn.

  Thirty years before, she’d been less sharp in declaring whatever doubts she had about my character. “You’d be sure and tell me if you thought Kelli needed something, wouldn’t you?” she asked.

  “Yes, I would,” I assured her.

  The doubtful look remained in Miss Carver’s eyes. “I hope so,” she said.

  I left the room quickly, as if it were a vise closing in on me. I felt exposed by Miss Carver’s questions, by the way my inadequate answers had suggested that Kelli and I were only co-workers on the Wildcat and that nothing of consequence, let alone intimacy, had ever passed between us. For a moment, I even felt angry at Kelli, insulted by the fact that she had not respected me enough to confide in me. My only comfort was in the belief that she hadn’t confided in anyone else either.

  But she had, and when I found out who it was, it astonished me.

  It was in Judge Thompson’s courtroom, of all places, that I learned about it, and as I sat motionlessly beside my father that day, I tried to keep control of the dreadful terror that had swept over me at that moment of discovery, the feeling that as error had fallen upon error, it had built a dark tower, one that would loom over Choctaw forever.

  And so Kelli Troy came to talk to you about this matter, is that right? Mr. Bailey asked his witness.

  The voice that answered him was steadier than I’d expected it to be.

  Yes, she did.

  And that was in the nature of a confidence, would you say?

  I guess so. She said she didn’t want me to mention it to anybody.

  Okay, now, could you tell the court just how that conversation happened to take place?

  Well, Kelli just came up to me after school one afternoon. She said, “Eddie, could I talk to you a minute?”

  So it was Eddie Smathers, of all people, to whom Kelli had gone in that mood of apprehension and self-doubt that had overwhelmed her in the days following her first meeting with Lyle Gates. And it was Eddie Smathers who alone knew the reason for that sense of withdrawal that had so worried Miss Carver. She had thought it a portent of doomed love, but it was nothing of the kind, as Eddie Smathers’s testimony that day made clear.

  What did Miss Troy tell you, Eddie?

  She talked about the night we all met at that little shopping center in Gadsden.

  That would have been the same night that Ben Wade has already described to the jury, isn’t that right?

  Yes, sir.

  And what did Miss Troy say about that night?

  She said it had scared her.

  Scared her? In what way?

  Well, at first, I figured she meant the way the nig—the colored people—the way they were demonstrating down there that night. I thought they’d maybe scared her a little, something like that.

  But that wasn’t what had scared Miss Troy, was it?

  No, sir.

  What had scared her, Mr. Smathers?

  Lyle had. At l
east that’s what Kelli said.

  What did she say exactly?

  She said she’d come down to Gadsden to check out what the colored people were doing, but that when Lyle showed up, she’d gotten scared to talk to them.

  Did she say anything else?

  Yes, she did. She said that she’d felt disappointed in herself because she’d gotten scared off by Lyle, and that she was never going to walk away from anything like that again.

  Why do you think she was telling you this?

  Well, I thought maybe she was sort of sending a message to

  Lyle.

  Did you give Lyle that message?

  No, sir. I’m not that close with Lyle.

  Mr. Bailey had gone on with a few more questions, most of them inconsequential, before turning Eddie over to Mr. Wylie, Lyle’s defense attorney.

  Now, Mr. Smathers, can you tell us how long it was after that meeting in Gadsden that you had this conversation with Miss Troy?

  About three weeks or so, I guess.

  Did Miss Troy say that she’d heard from Lyle Gates since that time?

  No, she didn’t.

  Or seen him?

  No.

  Mr. Smathers, did you see anything frightening in the way Lyle Gates behaved toward Miss Troy that night in Gadsden?

  No, sir.

  In fact, he was pretty friendly to her, wasn’t he?

  I guess so.

  Did Lyle Gates ever indicate to you that he disliked Miss

  Troy?

  No.

  Did he ever threaten her in your presence?

  No.

  Then why, Mr. Smathers, do you think he sits here accused of doing such awful things to her?

  Eddie gave the only answer he could have. I don’t know.

  Nor did he ever know.

  And so even now, when I see him here and there around Choctaw, making a deal on the street or glad-handing the congregation at the First Baptist Church, Eddie seems the only person who fell within the circle of what happened on Breakheart Hill who has never felt its cruel touch. When we meet, he smiles brightly, boyishly, asks about Amy and Noreen, then pumps my hand and glides away, happy and oblivious, utterly unstained by the moral darkness that briefly swirled around him. It is as if his own intractable limitedness has worked like a suit of armor, protecting him from the piercing encroachments of a crime in which, though wholly without knowing it, he played a crucial part.

  Occasionally, I have imagined confronting Eddie with all he does not know. I have played the scene in my mind endlessly. We meet by accident. He stops to chat with me as he always does. He speaks of sports, the weather, the poor condition of the mountain road. He finally runs out of chatter, starts to leave, grabs my hand.

  It is then I draw him to me with a sudden, unsettling tug. Instinctively, he tries to draw away, his eyes perplexed, vaguely frightened by the violence of my grip. But I don’t let him go. I tug him closer to me. My fingers tighten like a noose around his wrist, pulling him nearer and nearer until his ear is at my lips. Then, still clasping him tightly, I whisper: “Don’t you ever wonder why?”

  I am sure he never does.

  But others do.

  I hear them ask that question all the time. Sometimes I hear it rise toward me from the grave, as it does with my father and Shirley Troy, and even Sheriff Stone. Sometimes I hear it from the living, silently, but with an agonizing force, as when, years ago, the small bruised eyes of little Raymond Jeffries first lifted toward me beseechingly from the white sheets of my examining table. I have heard it whispered from behind the dark lenses of Sheila Cameron’s glasses, as well as from the small gray stone that marks her daughter Rosie’s grave.

  There have even been occasions when I have risen from my bed, walked out onto my front porch, stared out over the lights of Choctaw and heard nothing but a chorus of low, mournful questions. Why did my husband never love me? Why did my father hate me? Why did my daughter have to die?

  I stand mutely, listening to their confused and melancholy whispers. And I know that unless I tell them, they will never know.

  PART THREE

  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.