Breakheart Hill (19 page)

The voices of the marchers continued to drone on
behind us, and from the corner of my eye, I saw them as a slowly moving blur against the lighted window of the department store.

Lyle seemed hardly to see them at all. He was still focused on Kelli. “You ever go to an Oriole game?” he asked her.

She shook her head.

“Well, girls don’t much like baseball,” Lyle said quietly. Then he shivered slightly. “I guess you being from up north, you’re more used to the cold than we are.”

“Maybe a little,” Kelli said.

Lyle looked at her a moment longer, awkwardly. For the first time he seemed to notice the marchers, his eyes concentrating on them briefly before returning to Kelli. “I guess you think we have some pretty strange ways down here,” he said. For a moment, he waited for her to respond. When she didn’t, he shrugged. “Well, I got to exchange this bat and get some other stuff for my little girl.” Then he stepped away, motioning for Eddie to follow along with him, and the two of them walked past us, through the circling line of marchers and into the department store.

Kelli and I remained in place.

“I think we better forget about talking to the marchers for now,” I told her. “We’ll do it some other time, when Lyle’s not around.”

Kelli glanced toward the department store. Inside, Lyle could be seen moving slowly among the racks, selecting clothes for his daughter. Her eyes lingered on him a moment, then swept back to me. “He just had that bat because he was—”

“I know,” I told her quickly. “But somebody like him, you never know what he might do. That’s why we should come back another time.”

Despite her earlier determination to talk to the marchers, Kelli did not argue with me. She simply nodded and walked silently back to the car with me.

But a few minutes later, as we drove back toward Choctaw, she seemed uneasy.

“We didn’t do anything,” she said softly.

“What did you want to do?” Noreen asked.

“I don’t know for sure,” Kelli replied. “Maybe learn something.”

I dropped Kelli off at her house a few minutes later, drove Noreen to her house in Choctaw, then headed home myself.

And that was the end of it, as I told the people in Judge Thompson’s courtroom six months later. Mr. Bailey stood quite close to the witness box. He took the wire-rimmed glasses from his face and squinted toward me.

And to your knowledge, that was the first time Miss Troy met Lyle Gates, is that right, Ben?

Yes, it was
.

And when was the second time they met?

I felt the cold edge of his question as I had felt no other during my time on the stand. Instantly I recalled the triumph that had swelled within me that afternoon as my knees had buckled and I’d sunk to the ground. But more than anything, I remembered the feel of Kelli’s arms as they’d gathered around me, and with that embrace, the conviction that at last I’d done it, that she was mine.

T
HREE WEEKS AFTER THE TRIP TO GADSDEN, MY FATHER
arranged for me to have a meeting with Dr. Walter McCoy, the oldest and most respected physician in Choctaw. Dr. McCoy was not a warm man, and without doubt one of the reasons he’d gone into medicine in the first place was the money he could make. Still, he was a thorough professional, and what he lacked in sweetness he made up for in competence.

He received me very formally that day, and perhaps a little skeptically, too.

“So, your father tells me you want to be a doctor,” he began.

He lowered himself into the old wooden swivel chair behind his desk and drew his white lab coat over his rounded stomach, his fingers toying with its white plastic buttons. “Lots of people want to be doctors nowadays. Probably because they’ve been watching doctor shows on TV.”

I felt an immediate need to separate myself from those people whom Dr. McCoy clearly regarded as
whimsical in their dedication to a medical career. “I don’t watch much television,” I told him.

“Too busy studying, is that it?”

I nodded.

“Good,” Dr. McCoy said. “You’ll have to get used to studying quite a lot if you want to be a doctor.”

“Yes, sir,” I said reverently.

Dr. McCoy seemed to take me seriously for a moment, even to the point of assuming that I would actually become a doctor. “And when you get your degree, where do you intend to set up practice?” he asked.

I thought instantly of Kelli, of the future I had so entirely imagined for us by then. “Right here in Choctaw,” I told him.

Dr. McCoy looked at me with mock seriousness. “So, you’re going to be my competition, are you?”

I didn’t know what the right answer might be to such a question. So I said only, “I guess so.”

But I never was part of Dr. McCoy’s competition. Years later, when I finished medical school and returned to Choctaw, he asked to meet with me. “I’m getting old, Dr. Wade,” he told me, “and my son was never interested in medicine, so I have to think about turning my practice over to someone else one day.”

I could see how the misspent quality of his son’s life had disappointed him, but I said nothing.

“I’d like my practice to go on,” Dr. McCoy told me. He smiled thinly. “After I’m gone, you know. For someone else.”

He had decided that that “someone else” was me, and not long after that I joined his practice, moving into the offices he maintained only a few hundred yards from the Choctaw County Courthouse, the same gray building in which Lyle Gates had been tried more than ten years before.

From my own consulting room I can glance out the window and see the old courthouse in all its granite majesty,
but I rarely look in that direction. Instead, over the years, I have concentrated on the future, on being a good doctor and gaining a reputation for compassion and generosity, as well as for skill and knowledge. It was a goal I long ago achieved, so that when I die, I know this town will remember me fondly, speak of me warmly, even place a portrait of me in the sleek modern entrance of the new hospital. Under it, a plaque will no doubt record how nobly I lived, how selfless I was, how much I contributed to the welfare of my community. I have often imagined this plaque, along with the figure of a woman as she stands facing it. She is middle-aged, but still erect and slender, with dark curly hair. She has her arms wrapped around herself, as if holding something tight inside, and I know that this ghostly woman is Kelli Troy and that she is silently reviewing the list of my accomplishments, how I was the first doctor to build a clinic in the black part of Choctaw, the first to build a rural clinic on the mountain, the first to make weekly rounds at the city jail. Then, when she has finished reading, she turns to face me. And I see that her beauty is undiminished from the old time, that all her loss and suffering has only given her a deeper grace. For a moment she peers at me silently. A terrible judgment gathers behind her eyes. Then, at last, she speaks, and what she says both amazes and devastates me, for it is spoken in a voice that has not aged in thirty years, nor lost any of the fierce passion I’d heard in it so long ago:
Ah, Ben, I am so proud of you
.

B
UT SHE WAS NOT ALWAYS PROUD OF ME, NOR OF HERSELF
, either.

In the days following our trip to Gadsden, Kelli grew oddly distant. She drew inward, wrapping herself in long silences I was reluctant to interrupt. Although we continued to work on the
Wildcat
as often as we always had, I sensed that some part of Kelli’s earlier dedication to
it had slipped away. Her pace slowed, and she offered no new ideas for the coming issue. When I dared to offer one or two, she would nod her head approvingly, but add nothing more. It was as if she had decided to exist only on the periphery, doing layout or routinely editing someone else’s story rather than pursuing something of her own.

The same distance continued outside the newspaper office. In class she sat in a kind of suspension, vaguely attuned to what was going on around her, but unmoved by it. The little debates that occasionally flared up in Mr. Arlington’s history class swirled around her like small winds around a large stone, incapable of drawing her in. The same listlessness followed her down the corridor to the next class, then the next, until at the final bell, she would either join me in the basement or walk mutely to her bus, take her seat near the front and wait to be driven home.

Now, when I think of her in those last days of winter, I see her wrapped in her inward trouble, silenced by its depths, a teenage girl who had suddenly been made to face something she didn’t like, but from which she could not withdraw.

Everyone seemed to have a theory as to what might be wrong with Kelli. Sheila Cameron asked me if perhaps Kelli was having some kind of “female” trouble, and even suggested that she see Dr. McCoy. “Girls get that way when it comes on them, you know,” she said in a quick, confiding whisper.

Luke had a theory, too. “My guess is, it’s finally set in.”

“What has?”

“Homesickness,” Luke answered matter-of-factly.

We were at Cuffy’s, of course, and outside, a cold winter rain was thumping against the window. Luke took a spoonful of his Frito Pie and added, “She’s probably been fighting it for quite a while.”

“But she seemed to like Choctaw before this,” I
protested. “Remember what she was like at Sheila’s Christmas dance?”

“She can like it okay,” Luke replied. “But she can still think about the way it was up north, the people she left behind.”

Later that evening, sitting by the fire, my father reading the newspaper in his shabby wool sweater only a few feet away, I thought about these mysterious “people” whom Kelli had left in Baltimore. Perhaps there was a boyfriend still pining for her, a disconsolate friend, a relative. It was then that I recalled the sudden passion with which Kelli had told me that she had no father. But everyone had a father, I told myself emphatically. Perhaps Kelli’s distress had something to do with him.

I tried the theory out on Luke the very next day.

“Maybe it has to do with her father,” I said. “Maybe he’s turned up or written her, or something like that.”

“Who is he?” Luke asked.

“I don’t know,” I admitted. I was reluctant to say more, and certainly reluctant to repeat Kelli’s bizarre declaration that she had no father.

“Well, maybe he’s dead.”

“Maybe.”

Luke shook his head. “My guess is, she’s homesick, like I said before.” He gave me a friendly punch. “Don’t worry, Ben, she’ll snap out of it.”

But she didn’t. And as day followed day, I felt Kelli’s loss as a steadily darkening atmosphere, an aching gloom that seemed to overtake me as completely as it had overtaken her, robbing the radiance from her eyes, smothering that part of her that burned with a mysterious energy.

“Maybe you should just ask her straight out,” Luke suggested finally.

“Sheila tried that,” I told him, “but Kelli really didn’t say much.”

“Well, she’s got to be talking to somebody,” Luke said emphatically.

Then it occurred to me that there was at least one other person I could consult. From time to time during the last few days, I’d spotted Kelli talking briefly with Noreen, the two of them walking together in the hallway or down the steps toward Kelli’s waiting bus. At those moments, Kelli had seemed a bit lighter. Once I had even glimpsed the flicker of a smile.

It was at the end of the school day on a Friday when I spotted Noreen as she headed down the walkway to where her mother usually picked her up. I had noticed that her mother was not usually there when Noreen reached the pickup point, and that Noreen often had to wait for quite some time beside the short brick columns at the end of the sidewalk, sometimes leaning wearily against them, angry and exasperated.

It was very cold that day, and she looked nearly frozen as I approached her. Her face was red with the cold, and her eyes were squeezed together so tightly I could barely make out their color.

She answered my greeting glumly, her eyes glancing irritably up the street. “It’s freezing.”

“Waiting for your mother?”

“Like always. She’s never on time.”

“I could take you home,” I told her.

She looked at me, clearly surprised by the offer. Then she said, “I’d better wait for my mother.”

I smiled. “Why? She doesn’t wait for you.”

It had been a clever response, and Noreen clearly appreciated the hint of revenge against her mother that was embedded in it.

“Okay, let’s go,” she said with a sudden relish. “It’ll teach her to be late in weather like this.”

On the way to Noreen’s house we talked about trivial things until I finally summoned the will to bring up Kelli Troy.

“Kelli’s been acting strange,” I said casually, as if it were no more than an aside.

Noreen nodded, but said nothing.

“What do you reckon’s the matter with her?”

Noreen shrugged.

I waited a moment longer, then added, “She hardly talks to me anymore.”

Noreen’s eyes flashed a sudden recognition. “That’s why you offered to give me a ride, isn’t it? You just wanted to get me to tell you stuff about Kelli.”