Breakheart Hill (20 page)

I looked at her helplessly but said nothing. I had sought only to use her, and she was far too clever not to have noticed. There was no point in pretending that I’d had any other purpose in mind.

“You should have just come right out and told me that’s what you were after,” Noreen said, the sharpness still in her voice. “If you want to talk about Kelli, we’ll talk about Kelli. I’m not as stupid as you think, Ben. I know you’re in love with Kelli,” she said.

Did she hope I might deny it? When I didn’t, I saw a strange disappointment appear briefly, then vanish from her eyes. “What do you want to know about Kelli?” she asked wearily, as if accepting a role she had not wanted but was willing to perform.

“It’s just that she’s been acting strange,” I said weakly, “and I was wondering if you had any idea what’s bothering her.”

Noreen shook her head. “No, I don’t,” she said. “We’re not like that. We’re not close.”

“But I see you talking together sometimes.”

“It’s not really talking,” Noreen said. “Not like you mean. Not serious. Just chitchat.”

I nodded weakly. “Okay. I just thought I’d ask.”

We rode in silence after that; then, as we neared Noreen’s house, I felt her hand touch mine.

“Ben, I didn’t mean to get mad at you before,” she
said softly. “I know what you’re going through. I know it’s hard to deal with.”

I discarded the last remnants of my disguise. “Yes, it is,” I told her in what struck me as a deep admission, one that left me terribly exposed.

She smiled sadly, a knowing smile, full of acceptance, and I saw the woman she would soon become, and be forever after that.

“I don’t know what to do,” I told her.

She nodded slowly, then made the darkest and most tragic pronouncement I had ever heard. “When you love someone, it doesn’t make them love you back,” she said.

She said it only once, and in all the years since then, she has not repeated it.

But she has said other things, and they have often borne a kindred somberness. Several years ago, while at a medical convention in Atlanta, we went to a foreign movie, the sort that never comes to the theaters in Choctaw. It was about Camille Claudel, the woman who’d loved Rodin so madly, loved him to distraction, her love rushing her wildly over the brink of a dreadful folly.

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.

A
FTER 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 least 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.