Breakheart Hill (17 page)

The bell sounded, signaling the end of lunch period, and we all rose from our seats to take our trays, dump them and go to class.

“Well, see you later, Ben,” Todd said as he got to his feet, Eddie in tow beside him. Then he looked at Kelli. “Nice talking to you,” he said, and, just as he pulled away, reached over and touched her shoulder, the tips of his long, slender fingers actually disappearing into her black hair.

Kelli and I dumped our trays, then walked out of the lunchroom and down the corridor toward Miss Carver’s classroom, a great bustle of students flowing in all directions around us.

“Todd’s going to ask you out,” I said as lightly as I could. “I could tell by the way he was talking to you.”

“No he’s not,” Kelli said, dismissing the idea.

I pretended to be joking with her. “Yeah, he is,” I insisted. “He’s probably going to ask you to go see
A Summer Place
with him. You know, because it’s supposed to be such a hot movie.”

Kelli laughed. “Well, even if he did ask me, I wouldn’t go out with him.”

I stared at her, astonished. “You wouldn’t? You wouldn’t go out with Todd Jeffries? Why not?”

Kelli turned toward me, now so serious about what she was about to say that I knew it came from something in her past experience, something that lingered in her, like a warning. “Because right now he seems perfect,” Kelli told me, “and so it would just be a matter of time before I’d be disappointed in him.”

She stopped at her locker. She opened it, and drew
out Willa Cather’s
A Lost Lady
, another of Miss Carver’s tales of doomed love, the penultimate we would read that year, and the one destined to be Kelli’s favorite.

“You really wouldn’t go out with him?” I asked doubtfully.

Kelli looked at me, surprised by the question. “Why do you keep asking me that?”

“Because it’s hard to believe. All the girls want to go out with Todd.”

Kelli shrugged. “Well, it’s just that I think it’s better to start out with someone who’s not so great,” she said matter-of-factly, “but somebody who becomes great as you get to know him.”

In the vanity of the moment, it seemed like a formula devised with me in mind.

“You really feel that way?” I persisted.

She nodded, closed the door of her locker and headed down the corridor.

I walked along beside her, silent, but inexpressibly uplifted. It was as if I had suddenly grown taller and more handsome, discarded my glasses, become the equal of Todd Jeffries, a figure of consequence as he was, but for whom, unlike Todd, other glories still awaited.

It was an air of triumph that must have clung to me all that day. For after school, when Luke and I met in the parking lot, he noticed it immediately.

“You look, I don’t know … happy,” he said.

I nodded.

“So what happened? Did Mr. Arlington finally give you an A or something?”

“No,” I answered. “Nothing like that.”

“What then?”

I shrugged. “Nothing, Luke. I guess I just feel good for some reason, that’s all.”

He did not believe me. “There’s got to be a reason,” he insisted. He gave me a playful shove. “Come on, you can tell me. What is it, Ben?”

I couldn’t answer him exactly. Any more then than I can now, when, after I have been locked in a long silence, he will draw the old pipe from his lips and look at me worriedly, sensing some troubled part of me he cannot reach, the same chilling question in his eyes:
What is it, Ben?

S
OMETIMES I WILL GLANCE INTO THE WINDOW OF A JEWELRY
store and all the rings, in all their small velvet cases, will be Kelli’s ring, old and tarnished as she insisted it remain. Or I will place the delicate membrane of my stethoscope just beneath a woman’s breast, look up and it will be Kelli’s face peering at me, her heartbeat thundering in my ear. And sometimes, at the end of a sleepless night, Noreen will ease herself closer to me. I will draw her snugly beneath my arm, smile quietly, and pretend that I think of no one else, that Breakheart Hill no longer casts a shadow over the life we have together.

But Noreen knows better, and always has. She senses Kelli’s presence in a thousand small corners, and from time to time, confronts it outright. On the afternoon after Todd Jeffries’s funeral, for example, she sat down on the sofa in the living room and glanced out the window toward the dark line of impaling spires that is all Choctaw can offer as a skyline. “You know,” she said, “in a way I don’t think Todd ever got over Kelli Troy.”

I lowered myself into the chair opposite her. “I guess
not,” I answered dully, pretending no interest in the question.

She continued to stare out the window, her eyes carefully averted. “Have you?” she asked finally, bluntly, her eyes edging over toward me as she waited for my answer.

“It wasn’t the same thing with Kelli and me.”

“The same as what?”

“The same as it was between Todd and Kelli.”

Noreen continued to watch me. When she spoke, there was a cruel edge in her voice. “You mean she never loved you.”

Even at that moment, thirty years after Breakheart Hill, I found it hard to admit so unbearable a truth. It was as if my final inability to win Kelli’s love remained the deepest failure of my life.

Noreen appeared to sense my unease. “I mean, at least not in the same way she loved Todd,” she said softly.

I nodded, but said nothing.

Noreen glanced away, then back to me. “Todd’s son looked sour at the funeral,” she said.

“Raymond always looks sour.”

“He’ll come to a bad end, I think.”

“He already has.”

I saw him again as a little boy, his bruised left eye staring up at me from my examining table, his mother next to me, her whispered words nearly frantic in their plea:
Please don’t mention this, Ben
.

“Todd wasn’t a good father,” I added, remembering the day I’d confronted him about Raymond, the mournful look on his face as he’d offered his apology.
My hand just flew out, Ben. Sorry, sorry
.

“Why did he treat Raymond that way?” Noreen asked. “Mary, too. Was it the drinking that made him do things like that?”

Todd had asked the same question, and I’d stared at
his ravaged face, recalled how adoringly he’d once gazed on Kelli Troy, and thought,
No, Todd, it is lost love
.

“Todd being the way he was,” Noreen said, “I guess not much could be expected of Raymond.” Her mind seemed to return to the funeral, to Raymond’s sullen figure slumped in a metal chair beside his father’s grave, monstrously overweight in a rumpled black suit, his wife beside him, a silent, shrunken figure, and two listless, melancholy sons. “I guess Todd wanted a different son,” she said.

I did not reply. But I knew the “different son” he’d wanted. A dark boy with black curly hair and shining eyes. Gifted. Passionate. The son he might have had with Kelli Troy.

Noreen shook her head at the mystery of parents and children, husbands and wives, the devastations they exact upon one another. “I guess you can never know why a relationship goes bad,” she said.

She was right, of course. And yet, I might have pointed out that if you looked at it in a certain, very narrow way, concentrating on one small cog in a monstrously grinding machine, you might be able to conclude that at least part of it began with Noreen herself, or at least that the accident of her coming to Choctaw late in March of 1962 provided the hinge upon which opened an enormous door.

Although I’d seen Noreen in the hallway several times in the days following Todd’s mention of her arrival, it had never occurred to me to approach her.

It had occurred to Kelli, however.

“I think maybe we should talk to that girl from Gadsden,” she said one afternoon as we sat, doing layout, in the basement office.

“What about?”

“About what’s going on in Gadsden,” Kelli said. “She probably knows a lot about it.”

“Why would you want to talk to her about that?” I asked.

“For a story,” Kelli said.

I shook my head. “Gadsden’s over thirty miles from here. It’s way out of range for the
Wildcat.”

“But what’s happening there is happening all over the South,” Kelli insisted. “It could happen here in Choctaw, too.”

“I don’t think so,” I said.

“Why not?”

“Because that’s all being stirred up by outsiders. Besides, the colored people in Choctaw have it pretty good.”

For the first time since I’d known her, Kelli looked disappointed in me. “You think they’re satisfied with the way things are in Choctaw?” she asked sharply, her eyes blazing suddenly. “You think it’s different for them here?”

I shrugged. “Well, not exactly satisfied,” I answered cautiously.

“Well, what, then?” Kelli demanded. “They’re either satisfied or they’re not.”

I raced for an answer that would soothe the irritation I could see building in her. “I mean, they have it better in Choctaw than they do in a lot of places down here,” I told her. “Better than in the Black Belt, for example. Or in Mississippi.”

Kelli’s glance was piercing. “You really believe that, Ben?”

But before I could answer, she’d leaped to her feet. “Let’s go for a ride.”

“Where to?”

“Just across town,” Kelli answered, already halfway out the door. “I want to show you something.”

We walked directly to my car, Kelli speeding up with each step.

“Okay, where are we going?” I asked once we were both inside.

“The cemetery.”

“The cemetery?”

“The town cemetery,” Kelli repeated.

The town was nearly deserted, though it was only around five in the afternoon, and a winter twilight had already begun to descend upon us. Still, it was light enough by the time we got to the cemetery for us to see its rolling hills clearly. A single roadway snaked its way among the gray and white stones, and I drove up it slowly, staring at the short brown grass that covered the graves on either side.

“What am I looking for exactly?” I asked as we neared the cul-de-sac that would circle us back to the main road.

“You can stop here,” Kelli said.

I pressed the brake pedal, and the old Chevy came to a halt.

“I’ll keep the engine going so we can stay warm,” I said, anticipating that Kelli was about to tell me a story, perhaps similar to the one she’d told me weeks before near Lewis Creek.

“We’re getting out,” Kelli said.

She was already heading toward the eastern corner of the cemetery by the time I caught up with her. She was walking swiftly, her hands sunk deep in her pockets, an icy wind slapping her checked scarf against her shoulder.

“Are we looking for a particular grave?” I asked.

“No,” Kelli said brusquely. She kept walking, past row after row of names carved in stone, but otherwise anonymous and unknowable lives.

After a few hundred yards, we came to the border of the cemetery, a place where its neat lines of clipped grass disappeared into an indistinct and untended field of weeds and briar.

Kelli stood in place, her eyes trained on the littered ground that stretched before her. It was ragged and desolate, and nothing save a chaotic scattering of upended
rocks, flat and brown, marked it as anything but a field of bramble.

“This is the Negro cemetery,” Kelli said. “You’ve seen it before, haven’t you, Ben?”

“Yes, I’ve seen it,” I admitted.

Which was true. But I had seen it only from a great distance, as a scraggly line of weeds at the far end of the impeccably pruned white cemetery, never close up, or, in the context of that afternoon, never minutes after having stated so flatly and with such certainty that the Negroes of Choctaw lived “better” than in other places.

Kelli’s eyes challenged me. “It’s not right, something like this,” she said. “And the Negroes won’t stand for it forever. Not even here in Choctaw. That’s why I think we should talk to Noreen Donovan.”

I nodded. “Yes, I guess we should,” I told her, my eyes sweeping over the old Negro cemetery with a sudden and strangely urgent discontent with the way things had always been.

N
OREEN APPEARED AT THE END OF THE CORRIDOR THE NEXT
afternoon, a tall girl with a long, slender neck. Her clothes were neat but not particularly fashionable, chosen for comfort rather than for style, a form of dress that has not changed over the years. She wore her hair long in those days, well below her shoulders, not cut short and frosted as she wears it now. She had light, nearly flawless skin and bright blue eyes that seemed more open then, less veiled in unspoken thoughts.

“I’m Noreen Donovan,” she said.

“Hi, I’m Kelli Troy,” Kelli said as she stretched out her hand.

Noreen fumbled with her books for a moment, then managed to free her hand. “Hi,” she said.

“My name’s Ben Wade. I’m glad Miss Carver gave you our message.”

Noreen nodded quickly, with that same “Let’s get on with it” briskness that has not slowed down much in thirty years.

“Kelli and I work on the
Wildcat
,” I told her.

Another quick, no-nonsense nod. “What’s that?”

“The school paper,” Kelli said.