Breakheart Hill (32 page)

“Who did?”

“Kelli.”

I felt as if my skin had suddenly been pricked by a million tiny needles.

“The day it happened,” Noreen added. “She called me that day.”

“What did she want?”

She seemed reluctant to answer. “You, Ben,” she said finally. “She was looking for you.”

I felt my breath catch in my throat.

“She didn’t say why she was looking for you,” Noreen added quickly.

A wave of relief swept over me. “Well, maybe she
just wanted me to give her a ride up to Breakheart Hill,” I said weakly. “She was always calling me for a ride.”

Noreen stared at me evenly. “Then why didn’t she ask me for a ride?”

I had no answer for her, and admitted it.

Noreen paused a moment, and in that brief interval I knew that there was more.

“When she called me, she sounded like she’d been crying,” she said.

Instantly, I saw Kelli’s face, saw her eyes, the dread that must have been in them, a black net descending.

“Why would she have been upset like that, Ben?” Noreen asked.

For the first time in my life, I felt truth not as something valuable, to be sought after, a shining light, but as a knife at my throat. And so I lied.

“I don’t know, Noreen,” I said.

She gazed at me closely, like a doctor examining a body, looking for the source of its malignancy. “Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

She watched me silently, as if making a decision for all time, a choice she would have to live with forever. “Okay,” she said at last. Then she touched my hand with a single outstretched finger. “Sheriff Stone talked to me. You know, like he’s talked to everybody at school.”

I nodded.

“But I didn’t tell him about Kelli’s call,” she said. “Or that she was looking for you that day, or anything like that.”

I said nothing.

She looked at me significantly, as if swearing a grave oath. “And I never will,” she said.

For a moment we stood facing each other silently. Then her arms lifted toward me, gathered me into a firm embrace. When she spoke, her voice was low, its tone unmistakably collusive. “What do we do now?”

I felt her arms tighten around me, and I knew that I would never be loved more powerfully than this by anyone. And it struck me that over time I might offer loyalty in return, devotion through the years, perhaps even come to feel it as a kind of passion.

M
ORE THAN EVER OVER THE LAST FEW DAYS, IT HAS RETURNED
to me in the sound of an ax blade whirring in the air, and of Luke’s voice directly after that.
Did you hear what happened to Lyle Gates?

Even as he said it, so matter-of-factly, I heard all the other questions he has asked through the years, all his unspoken doubts like a chorus in my mind. Luke believes that there is something missing in the case the prosecution brought against Lyle Gates, something missing in the motive Mr. Bailey offered the jury to explain what happened on Breakheart Hill.

And so he has not forgotten Lyle, nor his own testimony at the trial, nor mine, nor even the dramatic way Edith Sparks pointed Lyle out as the man she’d seen coming out of the woods that day, her finger trembling in the charged atmosphere of Judge Thompson’s courtroom, her voice barely carrying as far as the jury box, so that she’d had to repeat her answer, saying it harshly the second time, and in a voice that carried outrage as well as testimony:
Him
.

But more than anything, Luke has not forgotten the
look on my face as he struggled to tell me what he’d seen on Breakheart Hill. He has not forgotten the dead eyes that greeted him, the tightly closed mouth, the utter stillness that enveloped me, and that even as he tried to tell me, suggested I already knew. And I know that it is a face that has surfaced many times in his mind over the years, like a corpse suddenly given up by the river.

And so there was something darkly suggestive in the way he posed the question that afternoon, the words coming slowly, heavily, as if hung with weights.
Did you hear what happened to Lyle Gates?

I shook my head almost casually, revealing no hint of the pang I suddenly felt at the mention of his name. “No, I haven’t heard anything about Lyle,” I answered.

It was late on a fall afternoon, and Luke had dropped by my office as he often did, though on this occasion he had no doubt been urged there by what he’d just learned. “Well, you knew he’d been brought to the prison farm, didn’t you?” he asked.

Two years before, the local paper had noted that after twenty years in the state penitentiary, Lyle had been moved to a prison farm near Choctaw to serve the rest of his sentence. His mother was ailing, the article said, and she had petitioned the Board of Prisons to have Lyle moved closer to her so that she could continue to visit him without having to endure the hardship of a long journey. The board had granted Mrs. Gates’s petition, and Lyle had subsequently been transferred to a prison farm in the northern part of the county. I had neither heard nor read anything about him since that time. So that Luke’s question, when it came, struck me with the suddenness of a gust of wind.

“Yes, I knew he was at the prison farm. But that’s the last I’ve heard about him.”

“Well, they killed him yesterday, Ben,” Luke said.

I felt my lips part in a stunned whisper, but no sound emerged.

Luke sat in the chair in front of my desk, his eyes trained on mine. “Killed him,” he repeated. “Shot him down.”

“Who?”

“Well, to tell you the truth, from the way it sounds, he sort of killed himself.”

I stood up, walked to the window and looked out. To the right, I could see the old courthouse standing in its grave severity atop a flight of cement stairs. I remembered how I’d stood on those stairs years before, stood in the driving rain with my father next to me, the two of us watching as Lyle passed by, so very small, as he had seemed, against the enormous gray monolith of Sheriff Stone.

“Suicide, that’s what I’d call it,” Luke went on. “I mean, he didn’t give the guards much choice.” He drew the newspaper from beneath his arm and dropped it on my desk. “It’s all in there,” he said. “You can read it when you get a chance.”

I nodded, my eyes still locked on the old courthouse, the sternly accusing look of its high stone walls.

“You know, Ben,” Luke said, “I never could figure out why Lyle would do something like that.”

I heard Mr. Bailey’s voice echoing through the years:
Only hate can do a thing like this
.

“I know what they said it was,” Luke said. “That Lyle wanted to get back at Kelli for treating him the way she had that day at Cuffy’s. But that was weeks before, Ben. That was old business as far as Lyle was concerned.”

I offered nothing, said nothing.

“Of course it could have been that he was all fired up by that stuff Kelli wrote in the
Wildcat
,” Luke said. He fell silent, and I knew that he was reconsidering it all again, going through the old details, chewing on the questions that still plagued him. “But to attack a young girl the way he did? I don’t know, Ben. Lyle never seemed mean enough for something like that. I mean, the
way Kelli treated him at Cuffy’s, that would have made him mad, but not
that
mad.”

I kept my eyes on the far mountain, its shadowy ridges growing darker as night fell. In my mind I saw Lyle stalking through the dense green undergrowth, his eyes searching for the girl he’d seen in Luke’s truck, the one who’d insulted him in full view of the men he worked with on the road, an affront whose depth, as I believed at the time, even he could not have imagined as he’d stood, thunderstruck, in Cuffy’s Grill that day.

“I guess there’ll always be a few things in life we’ll never know,” Luke said.

I returned to my chair and eased myself into it. “I guess so,” I told him softly, wearily, as if all the years had fallen upon me, depositing in one great load their full, enormous weight.

He looked at me tenderly. “You’ve never gotten over it, have you, Ben?” he asked.

I shook my head. “No.”

“Me neither, in a way,” Luke said. “Probably a few others, too.”

I said nothing, but only let my eyes drift down toward the newspaper, my mind slowly repeating the names of all the others who had never gotten over it: Todd. Mary. Raymond. Sheila and Rosie. Noreen. Perhaps countless others down through time.

Luke shrugged. “Well, got to go. The boys are in from college tonight, so we’re making a big family barbecue.” He stood, walked to the door, then turned back. “You and Noreen want to drop by later, have some ribs?”

“No, thank you.”

“Well, take it easy, then.” He offered a faint smile before he stepped out of my office, carefully closing the door behind him.

I glanced down at the paper, reluctant to read what was in it, afraid of the surging blackness that would overwhelm me.

And so I waited until long after Luke had left my office before I finally leaned forward and spread the paper out across my desk. There was a picture of Lyle near the bottom of the front page. He was dressed in prison clothes, a figure slumped on a metal bed that had been attached to a bare cement wall. The years had added a dreadful puffiness to his face. His hair had darkened, and there were deep lines at his eyes, but more than anything I noticed the puzzlement in his face. He looked like a child asking a teacher to clear up some confusing point in math or science, unable to go on without an answer.

The article beneath the picture was no more than a few paragraphs, and it related exactly what had happened to him.

It had occurred in the middle of the previous afternoon. Lyle had been working with a road crew sent out from the prison farm to cut the tall grasses that grew along the state highway to the north. He’d been digging with a pickax, struggling to uproot a stubborn patch of kudzu, when he’d suddenly stopped, raised the pickax and begun to swing it over his head. The guards had surrounded him quickly, but he’d refused to drop the ax. Instead, he’d swung it ever more wildly, sending bits of grass and clay flying in all directions from its whirring blades before he’d abruptly lunged toward them so quickly that they’d “acted in their own defense,” as the paper put it, and fired upon him.

As I read, I saw all of it as if it were a film unspooling in my mind: Lyle ripping at the thick, resisting vine, the sweat running in grimy streams down his arms and back, darkening what remained of his blond hair. Suddenly his eyes narrow, his teeth clench, his fingers tighten around the handle of the ax, and I know that it has all come back to him in a terrible rush, the harsh words he’d so thoughtlessly spoken at Cuffy’s, Luke’s truck whizzing past him as he’d trudged up the mountain road, Edith Sparks’s accusing finger, the jury’s verdict and then that
long walk down the courthouse steps, the rain pelting down upon him like small gray stones.

And I knew that it was while he’d stood helplessly within the swirl of his memory, dazed by a dark kaleidoscope of images, that he must have decided to end it all.

I hear the whir of the blade as it begins to wheel about in the smoldering air, then the pistol shots that stagger him. Small geysers of blood erupt from his chest. His legs collapse beneath him. The left side of his face slams onto the clay beside the road, one green eye staring lifelessly into the summer woods.

I see all of this, and I think,
Will this never end?

L
YLE WAS BURIED IN THE TOWN CEMETERY THREE DAYS LATER
. A scattering of relatives, all looking faintly ashamed, perhaps even resentful of the darkness he’d brought to their family name, gathered at his grave. An old woman sat in a metal chair, and though time and a long illness had greatly changed her, I saw that it was Lyle’s mother.

I did not approach her, but when the funeral was over and I started to leave, I saw her wave her hand, motioning me toward her.

I walked over to where she sat beneath the shade of a huge oak tree, one of her daughters at her side.

“You’re Dr. Wade, aren’t you?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“I want you to know that I don’t bear you no ill will for what you said about Lyle in court.”

“I appreciate that, Mrs. Gates,” I told her.

“You just told the truth, that’s all.” She smiled softly. “Everybody says you’re a real good man.”

I nodded. “Thank you, ma’am,” I said calmly, but even as I said it, I could feel myself shrinking and drying up. It was a feeling I’d experienced before. I’d felt it the first time I’d noticed bruises on Raymond Jeffries’s small arms and legs, and then again as I’d lifted Rosie Cameron
off the stretcher, a weightless sack of broken bones, and realized that she was dead. I’d felt it yet again some years later as I’d looked back and watched Mary Diehl disappear into the same white room where she sits blankly to this day. And later still, I’d felt it when Luke and I had stumbled upon Todd Jeffries as he lay sprawled across the golf course at Turtle Grove. It was a sense of being wholly withered, bones like twigs gathered beneath a dry, crackling skin, and I was doomed to feel it at least once more.

Mrs. Gates smiled quietly, but I could sense something building in her mind. “I guess I have to accept it that Lyle did what everybody says he did,” she said softly. “But it’s hard for a mother to do.”