Breakheart Hill (22 page)

“We will never be afraid again,” I promised Kelli Troy.

Despite the boyish grandeur of my assurance, she seemed genuinely taken by it. “I’ll try to remember that,” she said softly.

Something loosened its grip on me, and I felt myself struggle to keep my eyes from glistening, so deeply did I feel the need to serve her, to rise to whatever occasion might present itself, to be what I had beheld in everything from old movies to epic verse. And so for once I said what I felt in as bold and determined a voice as I could manage at that moment. “I would never let anyone hurt you, Kelli.”

Kelli said nothing else, but only stared at me silently for a few seconds, as if trying to arrive at some conclusion about me. Then she reached into her bag again and pulled out a slender box she’d wrapped in bright red foil. “I haven’t been very nice to you lately, Ben. And so I wanted to give you something to make up for it, and maybe just to say I’m sorry.”

I took the package from her hand. “Should I open it now?”

“If you want to.”

From the shape, I thought it was a tie, but when I opened the box and slowly drew back the white tissue in which it had been wrapped, I saw that Kelli had bought me something far more personal and important.

“A stethoscope,” I said.

Kelli smiled. “I wanted to get you something really special. Something really nice.” She nodded at it approvingly. “It’s a real one,” she added, clearly proud of her choice, “but I guess you can tell that.”

“Yes, I can,” I told her. I hooked the silver earpiece
around my neck and ran my finger over the long black rubber tube that led to the tympanum. “It’s wonderful, Kelli.”

“Let’s try it out,” she said, and happiness seemed to surge through her voice. Then she took the tympanum and placed it on her chest.

“Can you hear it?” she asked.

I placed the earplugs in my ears and listened. I could hear the steady, muffled beat of her heart, soft and rhythmic, and suddenly I felt my whole body quicken to its pace, delicate, but thrilling. It was as close to intimacy as I had ever come, and in some sense, I suppose, as close as I would ever come in all the years after that.

I felt my breath quicken. My fingers tightened around the black tube of the stethoscope, and for the first time I felt my physical yearning as something separate from myself, a creature strapped within my skin, pent-up and explosive, barely within the grip of my control.

I quickly pulled the stethoscope away from her chest and turned away. “Your heart sounds pretty strong,” I told her matter-of-factly, carefully aping the tone of an examining physician, scientific and professional, desperate to conceal the disturbing rush that had suddenly swept over me, and in whose stormy eddies I was still adrift. “Very strong,” I repeated as I drew the stethoscope from my ears.

And it
was
strong, as it turned out, fierce and inexhaustible. But there was another part of her that proved more vulnerable to assault.

It was many years later when I actually saw that part. Dr. McCoy had died several weeks before, and in the course of going through the files he’d boxed and stored away at his retirement, I came upon an old one, its identifying letters faded with the years, but still distinctly visible:
TROY, ELIZABETH KELLI
.

At first, I couldn’t open it. But after a time, I pulled myself together and took the file to the adjoining room. I
held the X-rays I found inside up to the light box. There, in muted patterns of black and gray, I saw the curved box that encased her brain, the column of knotty vertebrae that supported it, the bony caverns from which had shone her eyes, the cartilage that had given her nose its distinctive shape. I also saw what had been done to her: the dark flow of hemorrhaged blood, the skull’s moonscape of lesions, fractures and contusions, a long splinter of broken bone sunk like a white needle into the gray folds of her brain. I stood transfixed before the X-rays’ unflinching record of her destruction, and during those few whirling seconds I relived it all, day by wrenching day, step by wrenching step, until I reached the end, and heard her breathe,
Not you
.

W
E THINK OF IT AS SOMETHING LURKING BEHIND A DOOR
. We see it in the glint of a blade or the cold blue muzzle of a gun. It is supposed to come at us from behind a jagged corner or out of a dense, nightbound fog, and we often imagine it as a stalking figure, shadowy and threatening, moving toward us from the far end of the alleyway, watching us with small, malicious eyes.

That is how Mr. Bailey imagined it, and he tried to make it the way the jury would imagine it, too, each of them seeing it again and again as they sat in the Choctaw jury room deliberating upon the fate of Lyle Gates, remembering Mr. Bailey’s final words to them:
Only hate can do a thing like this
.

But Mr. Bailey had said other things as well, and as I sat in the courtroom that last day, each and every word fell upon me with a dreadful weight.

“You have to see what Kelli Troy saw that afternoon,” he told the jury in that high, ringing voice he so often used during the trial. “You have to see something come toward you from out of the bushes. You have to see a man, bigger and stronger than you. You have to feel the
terrible hatred that he has for you, and the damage he has come to do to you. You have to see all of that in his eyes.”

He paused, lowering his voice to that softer, more intimate tone he used just as effectively. “And, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, although it is autumn now, and a cold rain is falling over Breakheart Hill, you have to imagine how beautiful it was on that bright, warm day five months ago. You have to say to yourself, as Kelli Troy must have said to herself, ‘I will never see such beauty again or hear the birds or feel the warmth of the sun.’ You, the members of the jury who have been chosen to render justice in this case, you, each and every one of you, have to do all of that before you can understand what happened to that young girl on that bright, sunny day. You have to see what she saw and feel what she felt and understand what she lost and will never see or feel or have again.”

I am sure they think they did, that as they mused over the events of Breakheart Hill, those twelve men and women saw Kelli’s eyes dart over to an unexpected sound, then widen as they watched Lyle Gates grimly emerge from the thick jungle greenness that surrounded her, his eyes aflame with the hatred Mr. Bailey had already described to them as “brutish and vengeful and probably lustful, too.”

But danger, even mortal danger, does not always look like Mr. Bailey would have had the jury see it on the last day of Lyle Gates’s trial. It is not always a stalking figure with raging, red-rimmed eyes, or even a coolly malicious one, patiently waiting in the shadows. It may be something else, something that calls to you gently, gathers you in warmly, caressingly, something that coaxes you sweetly toward destruction.

Some years ago, I said as much to Noreen as we sat at the breakfast table, reading the paper on a bright Sunday morning.

“It’s the ones who love you that you have to look
out for,” I said, rather idly referring to an article I’d just read about a father who’d poisoned his two sons. But Noreen had glanced up abruptly, her eyes trained lethally on mine. “What are you talking about?” she asked tensely.

The strain that had suddenly swept into her face puzzled me. “A man in the paper,” I explained. “He killed his sons so they could go to heaven.”

She nodded. But her eyes were still fixed on mine with a terrible concentration.

“What is it, Noreen?” I asked.

She hesitated a moment, the tumult building in her even as she labored to contain it. “Nothing,” she said finally, her eyes fleeing from me, focusing on the newsprint once again.

Nothing
, she’d said, but I knew better. I could see it in her eyes, and I knew that she’d heard my earlier comment in the context of that night so long ago. And in my mind I saw her as she’d appeared that evening, a motionless figure in the humid summer darkness, the powdery smell of violets clinging to her dress, her voice soft and oddly comforting in its conspiratorial whisper,
What do we do now?

K
ELLI’S ESSAY ON WHAT WE ALL REFERRED TO AS “THE RACE
problem” at that time was sent to Mr. Avery’s office the day after I first read it. In those days school officials always had to approve whatever students wrote, and I remember thinking that there was a good possibility Mr. Avery would not allow Kelli’s article to be published in the
Wildcat
. But he did approve it, and even went so far as to return it to Kelli and me personally.

“We can’t just turn away from our problems down here,” he told us as he stood in the corridor outside the basement office. Then he nodded with that exaggerated
and anachronistic courtliness that still clung to the last of his kind, and walked away.

“I guess that’s what you call a ‘gentleman’ down here,” Kelli said once he’d disappeared down the hallway.

I nodded. “Absolutely.”

We left the office together a few minutes later, and I remember that as we walked outside, I could feel the first thawing out of that long winter, the first hint of spring’s approach.

Kelli unbuttoned her coat, drew the long, checked scarf from her throat and tucked it beneath her arm. “It feels warm,” she said.

I glanced toward the sky. It was light blue, and the sun was very bright. “We should take a walk before I drive you home.”

“Where to?”

“We could go downtown. Then walk back and pick up the car.”

Kelli flashed me the smile I had seen so seldom since our trip to Gadsden.

We headed down the stairs, then along the sidewalk that led almost directly to the center of town.

“Do you think everybody will feel the same as Mr. Avery?” she asked after a while.

“Most people will, I think.”

“The only thing that bothers me is that the people who don’t like it, they can say that I’m just another ‘outside agitator.’ ”

I laughed. “Just another Yankee trying to tell us how to treat our Negroes.”

“That’s right.”

“Well, some people probably will say that, Kelli, but if they couldn’t say something like that, they’d just say something else instead.” I shrugged. “But we’ve got a lot of good people in Choctaw. Basically, it’s a nice town.”

She looked at me, clearly surprised. “I thought you hated Choctaw.”

“Not as much as I used to.”

“Why not?”

I didn’t dare tell her, so I lied. “Maybe I’m just a little more mature than I was a few months ago.”

“But do you still want to leave here as soon as you graduate?”

“Yes, but maybe not forever, though,” I told her. “Maybe just for while I’m in college.”

“And then come back?”

“Yes.”

She seemed pleased, and I allowed myself to believe that her pleasure in such a prospect was the same as mine, that it signaled the possibility that we might always be together, that slowly, incrementally, I was growing into that greatness she so intensely desired.

We walked on toward the center of town until we reached the park. The grass was still brown, the trees mostly bare, but the sense of their reawakening was everywhere, the earth poised to make its nod toward spring.

“Want to sit down?” I suggested.

“Okay,” Kelli said, then followed me to the short bench that rested at the edge of the deserted tennis court. It was the place she’d been sitting when I’d seen her that first day. In the manner of teenage love, it seemed sacred to me now.

I felt content enough to release a small portion of those feelings that had been growing in me for so long. “I saw you here once.”

“Here? When?”

“It was just before school started. You were reading.”

She suddenly recalled it. “You were playing tennis. You and … it was Luke, wasn’t it?”

“Yes, it was.”

She seemed amused by the memory. “It feels strange that there was a time when I didn’t know you.”

It was far from a declaration of love, but I relished it
anyway. “Yes, it does,” I said, then added cautiously, “especially since we’re so … close.”

She nodded, but added nothing, so I quickly went to another subject, one less charged with possible disappointment. “What do you want to write about for the next issue?”

Kelli’s answer came so quickly that I was sure she’d been considering it for a long time.

“History,” she said, her whole manner suddenly more alert, as if a starting pistol had fired somewhere, and she was off. “I want to find out what Choctaw was like at various times.” An invisible energy swept over her. “I’ve been looking into some things,” she said, even the rhythm of her speech now more rapid. “Did you know that there was once a slave market here?”

I looked at her doubtfully.

“It’s true,” Kelli said. “It was the only one in this part of the state.”

“A slave market? Here in Choctaw?”

“The big markets were farther south, where the cotton plantations were, but for a while, the northern part of Alabama had one slave market, and it was here in Choctaw.”

I still found it difficult to believe. “But there wasn’t that much slavery this far north. No real plantations. It was too mountainous for them. The farms were small.”