Breakheart Hill (13 page)

I say nothing.

Luke shakes his head slowly. “Why would Kelli not have wanted me to come back for her, Ben?” he asks softly.

“Well, maybe she intended to walk back,” I answer lightly, making nothing of the question.

“I don’t think so,” Luke says. “Hell, it’s over two
miles back down to Choctaw. She wouldn’t have been planning to walk that far, would she?”

“Probably not,” I admit. “But back then there was that little store right near where you let her out. Grierson’s, remember?”

“What about it?”

“Well, she might have been planning to call somebody from there.”

“To pick her up, you mean?”

“Yes.”

“No way, Ben. It was a Sunday. That store was closed.”

“How do you know?”

“Because that’s where he was. That’s where I saw him. Remember?”

I instantly recall the moment when I’d first heard Luke describe what he’d seen that afternoon. The courtroom had been jammed with spectators, my father and I crammed in with all the others. Not far away, I could see Miss Carver sitting stonily on the front bench, her eyes trained on Luke as he walked to the witness box.

A hush had come over the room as Mr. Bailey had begun to question him.

Now, Luke, you dropped Kelli Troy off on the mountain just up from Breakheart Hill on the afternoon of May twenty-seventh, isn’t that right?

Yes, sir
.

And about what time would you say that was? Around three-thirty
.

And after you dropped Kelli off, did you come on down the mountain by yourself?

Yes, sir
.

All the way back in to Choctaw, is that right, son?

Yes, sir
.

And on the way back down the mountain, did you have occasion to see anybody else up on that ridge?

Yes, sir, I did
.

And where did you see that person?

In front of Grierson’s Store
.

What was he doing?

He was walking up the mountain road
.

Toward where exactly?

Toward Breakheart Hill
.

How far would you say Grierson’s Store is from Breakheart Hill, Luke?

About a mile, I guess
.

It would take about thirty minutes to walk that, wouldn’t it?

About that, yes, sir
.

Now, Luke, if you saw him again, would you recognize the person you saw walking up toward Breakheart Hill that day?

Yes, sir
.

Is that person in the courtroom today? Yes
.

Could you point him out and say his name?

Luke had pointed with a firm, steady hand as he’d said the name:
Lyle Gates
.

At the mention of his name, I could remember glancing over to see Lyle as he sat beside his lawyer. He was wearing a gray suit that was too small for him, the cuffs of his shirt extending well beyond the sleeves of his jacket, his white socks stretching up toward the legs of his pants. His hands were clasped in front of him, and I remember noticing how the cuts and scrapes Sheriff Stone had found upon them when he’d first questioned him had healed during the period between his arrest and trial. I studied his slumped shoulders, the way he kept his head slanted, as if dodging an invisible blow. His eyes shifted about, unable to light on anything in particular, until they suddenly swept over toward me and locked there, as if he were studying me now, just as I had been studying him. I looked away, concentrating on Luke, until, after a few minutes, my eyes drifted back toward Lyle. He’d sat back in his chair by then so that I could see only his face in
profile, but even so I knew that his eyes were still ceaselessly moving in quick, nervous jerks.

Mr. Bailey was finishing up with Luke.

Now, when you saw Lyle Gates, he was on foot, is that right?

Yes, sir
.

Was there a car or truck anywhere around?

I didn’t see one
.

You only saw Lyle Gates walking, is that right?

Yes, sir
.

Now, son, I have to ask you one more time, because so much rides on your answer. Are you absolutely sure you saw the defendant, Lyle Walter Gates, walking up toward Breakheart Hill at approximately three-thirty on the afternoon of May twenty-seventh?

Yes, sir
.

You saw him with your own eyes?

Yes, sir. I saw him with my own eyes
.

I believe that despite all the years that have passed since then, Luke still sees Lyle Gates at times when he closes those same pale blue eyes. But does he see him exactly as he saw him that day on the mountainside, a slender young man trudging wearily past Grierson’s Store, the radiant afternoon sunlight glinting in his slick blond hair? Or does he see Lyle the way I so often see Kelli Troy, as a runner racing up a torturous slope, her body plunging through a brutal undergrowth of vine and briar?

L
UKE IS NOT THE ONLY ONE WHO REMEMBERS KELLI TROY
. Sheila Cameron remembers her, and several years ago, after the small stone memorial was erected on Breakheart Hill, she broke the long silence that had enveloped her since Rosie’s death. We’d not come to the ceremony together, and I had not expected her to approach me. During the speeches that had preceded the unveiling of the memorial, Sheila had stood off by herself, listening silently, almost motionless. Over the past few years, I’d often tried to breach the stony isolation in which she lived, but she’d refused each attempt, though always politely, saying only that she was “not very social.” But on that particular day, something eased its grip on her, and at the end of the ceremony, she stepped alongside me as I made my way up the hill. She’d wrapped herself in a long coat despite the warmth of the day, and her eyes, as always, were hidden behind the dark lenses of her glasses.

“Funny how it all comes back,” she said.

“Yes.”

“I thought you’d be the one to speak about Kelli today.”

I shook my head. “I asked Luke to do it. It would have been hard for me.”

“We lost a lot when we lost her,” Sheila said. “So young.”

She was talking about Kelli, but I knew that she was talking about Rosie, too, and I remembered the moment nearly twenty years before, when I’d drawn that tiny little girl from Sheila’s womb and placed her in her mother’s arms.

We stopped at the top of the ridge, the whole town below us, its chaos of streets and twisted lanes, spires pointing into emptiness.

After a moment, Sheila turned toward me. “You know, Ben, sometimes I think there must be some kind of animal out there. It’s invisible. We can’t see it. But it devours us. It devours our lives.” She waited for me to answer, her eyes still fixed on mine, but when I remained silent, she turned back toward the valley. “But it’s the same everywhere, don’t you guess?” she asked wearily.

I remembered something said long ago. “Every place is the whole world,” I told her, quoting Kelli Troy.

I
T SEEMS STRANGE THAT OF ALL THE GIRLS WHO CAME TO
know Kelli during her year at Choctaw High, Sheila came closest to being her friend. Certainly it was not a friendship I could have predicted. Sheila was very much a Turtle Grove girl, the only daughter of one of the town’s oldest and richest families. She had always moved in a circle of other Turtle Grove girls, a tight-knit little group that dominated Choctaw High almost completely. They inevitably went to each other’s parties, joined each other’s clubs, stole and discarded each other’s boyfriends and finally trotted off to college together, usually to the same sorority house at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, though an occasional rebel spirit might head south to Auburn instead. Most of them were exactly what their lives
had made them, gracious and well mannered, taking their considerable privileges for granted, but polite enough not to hold them over the rest of us. Even so, they were not prone to mingle with the mountain girls, or those from the rural villages that surrounded Choctaw, of which Collier, where Kelli lived, was unmistakably one.

So it struck me as rather strange when Sheila mentioned Kelli to me that morning, jauntily striding up to my locker, her books cradled in her arms.

“Hi, Ben,” she said.

Her smile was very bright, as always, and it, along with her hazel, nearly golden eyes, had dazzled most of the boys of Choctaw High at one time or another.

“Hi, Sheila.”

She leaned against the wall of lockers, almost seductively, as if she were cozying up to them. “I was just thinking about you last night,” she said, then caught the odd sound of that, laughed girlishly and added, “Well, actually, I was thinking about you and Kelli.”

This seemed no less odd to me than her opening statement. “Me and Kelli?” I said with a short laugh. “Why were you thinking about us?”

“Well, I’m planning to have a Christmas party in a few weeks, and I was thinking you and Kelli might want to come.”

I could only repeat dumbly, “Me and Kelli?”

“Well, you two are friends, aren’t you?”

“Yeah.”

“It’s not going to be a house party-type thing,” Sheila went on. “It’s going to be a dance. Sort of formal, like a Christmas prom, with everybody all dressed up.” She waved at a couple of girls as they walked by, then turned back to me. “I’m having it at the Turtle Grove Country Club. So, the way I want it, it’s no stags, you know. Just couples.”

I shook my head. “I don’t know if you’d call Kelli and me a—”

Sheila laughed and waved her hand. “I don’t mean it has to be like
that
, Ben. But just two people, together. No stags. You know, so that everybody has a dance partner.” She looked at me a moment, as if trying to find another way to explain it. “I mean, so when the dancing starts, nobody’s left out,” she added finally.

I turned toward my locker and needlessly began fiddling with the books and papers I’d crammed inside. “Have you talked to Kelli about this?”

Sheila shook her head. “No, I wanted to talk to you first.”

“Well, Kelli might want to bring somebody else,” I told her.

“I don’t think so,” she said. “I think she scares the other boys off. Being new, you know, and from up north. And some of the things she writes in the
Wildcat
. Sort of brainy. I think it keeps a lot of them back.” She tossed her head airily. “They’ll come around eventually, of course,” she said, “but for right now, they’re sort of keeping their distance.”

I instantly recalled Luke’s warning that Kelli wouldn’t be “new” for long, and that if I were interested in her, I needed to act right away. It seemed to me that Sheila’s Christmas party offered the perfect opportunity to do just that.

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll talk to Kelli about it.”

“Great,” Sheila said happily, her smile still in place, a feature that, at the time, seemed so fixed and unchangeable, so much the permanent product of an innocent and kindly nature, that I could not imagine her face without it.

I
SPOKE TO
K
ELLI THAT SAME DAY
. W
E’D BEGUN TO SIT NEXT
to each other in English class, by then, sometimes chatting quietly before class began, and later exchanging occasional glances as Miss Carver described in oddly haunting terms
the “tormented” combination of love and hatred that Heathcliff had felt for Catherine Earnshaw. At certain moments, Miss Carver seemed personally shaken by the dark clouds that had swept over that distant moor. In soft, faintly grieving tones, she spoke of passion and tragedy as if they were an inevitable part of life’s unknowable weave, the thread of one inseparably entwined with the other, each generation bearing anew its legacy of loss and ruin.

By that time, too, Kelli and Miss Carver had begun to linger in the room when class was over, Kelli to ask questions or make some comment she had preferred not to make during class, Miss Carver to elaborate, at a deeper level, some point she had purposely simplified for the other students. Occasionally I would also remain behind, listening as the two of them talked about a book in a way that I, as a science student, never talked about one, but which at last made me understand that certain books did not express things simply and directly, but from an angle and mysteriously, because the things they described were themselves inexact, and in part unknowable, and so could not be spoken of in terms of weights and measures, predictable actions and reactions.