Breakheart Hill (33 page)

“Yes, ma’am.”

She shook her head slowly. “I thought I knowed my son, but to this day I can’t figure out why he would have hurt that girl.”

She paused a moment, perhaps reconsidering it all, trying to picture the little boy she’d raised falling viciously upon a young girl in a deep wood. “I just can’t figure why he’d do a thing like that,” she repeated, and with those words I saw Lyle as he’d moved down the courthouse stairs that last day, one of Sheriff Stone’s enormous hands holding almost tenderly his arm, the rain mercilessly battering down upon him, my father’s words beyond his hearing.
There’s something missing in that boy
. And I remembered how I’d rushed away at that moment, disappearing into the crowd, disappearing from Choctaw, disappearing for hours until night had finally fallen and my father had gone in search of me, gone to Cuffy’s and Luke’s and finally up the mountain to where he’d found me sitting on the crest of Breakheart Hill, drenched and sobbing, his arms wrapping around me comfortingly in the driving rain, urging me to my feet and then back up toward the road, offering me the only words he could. I
know how much you loved her, son
, thinking that it was grief
and only grief that had sent me rushing from the courthouse steps, and never imagining that it might be more.

But it was not my father’s words that sounded over me now, but Mrs. Gates’s words, ragged with age, but passionate. “Lyle wasn’t a mean boy.” She shook her head slowly. “So I just can’t figure out what could have stirred him up so much against that poor girl.”

I heard my mind pronounce the words I still could not bring myself to say:
I can
.

B
UT I COULD NOT. AND I KNOW NOW THAT I MYSELF MIGHT
never have known the whole truth had not Miss Troy dropped by my office one morning. It was several years after Lyle’s death, and by that time many others had joined him in the grave—Todd, for example, along with Mr. Bailey, Miss Carver, my father, and Sheriff Stone.

It was early on an autumn morning. I’d gotten to my office before anyone else, and so I was alone when I heard the door open, then the soft, muffled beat of a cane.

I stepped out of my consulting room, glanced down the short corridor that led to the small waiting area and saw Miss Troy standing erectly as ever, her eyes drifting slowly about the room. She was very old by then, her hair a perfect white, but even in the distance, I could see that her eyes were still clear and sharp.

“Good morning, Miss Troy,” I said.

She turned toward me. A look of relief settled onto her face. “Ah, Ben. So good to see you.”

I nodded and came toward her.

When I reached her, she embraced me. Beneath her fall coat, her body seemed very small.

“Are you feeling all right?” I asked as I stepped out of her arms.

“Oh, yes,” she answered. “I’m fine.”

There was so much I wanted to tell her, but could not. So I said only, “Is there something I can do for you?”

For a moment, she seemed reluctant.

“Anything,” I assured her.

She hesitated a moment longer, then said, “Well, you remember that a few months back, at your father’s funeral, I mentioned that I might have a favor to ask?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Well, this morning I had to come up to the courthouse to put a few things in order, and I just decided to drop by and … and …”

“And what, Miss Troy?”

“And ask if you might be able to come by the house tonight.”

For an instant, I couldn’t answer, and in that brief interval, Miss Troy must have seen something very disturbing invade my face, because she quickly withdrew her request. “I just couldn’t,” I explained. “Even though … I just couldn’t.”

“I’m sorry, Ben. I shouldn’t have asked you to do that. I know how you felt about Kelli. I know that’s why you never came back to the house after what happened.”

I struggled to compose myself, to fight off the suffocating darkness that had flooded in around me and finally, to do the right thing. “No, no,” I said. “I’ll come by.” I drew in a long, determined breath. “Do you need some help, is that it?”

She nodded. “I’m too old to manage sometimes. Things get put off, you know.” She looked at me shyly, ashamed of the admission. “I’m so old now that things get put off.”

I smiled quietly. “Of course they do, Miss Troy.”

“But it’s not right, just to let things go,” she added.

“I understand.”

“I know it’s not your job to help me, Ben. But I was just thinking about the way it was with you and Kelli, and I thought that you would be the one to …”

“I’ll come this evening,” I assured her. “Just tell me what time I should be there.”

She nodded slowly, then took hold of my arm. “Just when your work is over,” she said. “And, Ben, I do appreciate it.” Then she turned and walked unsteadily from my office, her hand tightly gripped on her cane, her once-proud shoulders stooped beneath a burden whose intricate mass she had yet to understand.

I worked on through the rest of that long day, treating patients in my office, then doing rounds at the hospital. Faces came and went, faces that were young and old, black and white, male and female, people suffering from different ailments, enduring different degrees of pain, fear, helplessness. And yet, they all seemed curiously the same to me that day, all of them frightened and confused, lost in clouds of unknowing, asking the same questions in the same baffled and imploring tones:
Where did my life go wrong? Why did this happen to me? When will it finally end?

“I
DON’T KNOW
,” I
SAID
. “I
DON’T KNOW WHEN
I’
LL BE HOME
tonight.”

It was at the end of the day, and on the other end of the telephone line I could feel the tension in Noreen’s voice. “I don’t think you should go out there, Ben,” she said worriedly. “It’s been so long … it’s been …”

“Over thirty years.”

“… since you’ve been there,” Noreen went on, her voice growing steadily more agitated. “You can’t possibly know what—”

“No, I can’t,” I told her, “but Miss Troy is just too old to do things by herself now, Noreen. She can’t manage on her own. Her family’s gone. She’s frail. She can
barely walk, even with her cane. She needs help, and I’m the only—”

“But you might have to go more than once, you might have to—”

“I don’t think so,” I said firmly. I could tell that Noreen knew what I meant, but I said it anyway. “Miss Troy knows that she’s near the end, Noreen. That’s why she asked me to help her. Because she knows it will be only this one time.”

I heard her release a quick, resigned breath. “Well, I guess you know what you should do, Ben,” she said dully.

I hung up the phone and lowered myself into the chair behind my desk. The office was empty now, and quiet, with only an autumn wind to break the silence as it pressed softly against the windowpane. Outside it was gray, with thick clouds rolling in from the north. They had been gathering slowly all during the day, and by dusk they had descended over the upper quarter of the mountain, covering it in a smoky haze, so that as I headed for my car that evening, the lower slopes looked bare and burned over, naked, leafless, exposed, all the way from the old mining road up to the crest of Breakheart Hill.

I was halfway to Miss Troy’s when the rain began. It came first in a scattering of drops, then in a heavy falling, and finally in thick, windblown sheets that swept across the hood of the car or drove directly toward the windshield in sudden, angry gusts.

By the time I turned onto the road that led to Miss Troy’s house, small rivulets snaked tiny muddy rapids down the gullies that bordered either side of it and swollen brown puddles dotted the surrounding fields.

The dense cloud cover had brought a premature darkness to the valley, so that I’d finally had to switch on my headlights, their beams at last coming to rest on Miss Troy’s house, illuminating the disrepair into which it had fallen, the unpainted wooden slats and leaning underposts, a set of stairs that bowed down in the middle, its crossbeams
splintered and jagged, a yard so ravaged with deep ruts and scattered with debris that even in the nakedness of late fall it looked strangely junglelike, thick, weedy, overgrown.

I turned off the lights, then the motor, and sat in the shadowy interior of my car, the rain pounding down on all sides in a steady and disquieting assault. I started to get out, then heard Kelli’s voice:
Are you mad at me?
and felt all of it sweep back over me as it must have swept over Lyle the day he died, all of it swirling around me in a single boiling wave of memory, so intense and searing, it seemed to raise red welts across my soul.

Though it was dark inside my car, and the air held an autumnal chill, I could feel everything brightening slowly around me, the air warming as it had during the first weeks of that long-ago summer, and I knew that I was going back, helplessly back to that distant time, spinning as I went, like something small down a swirling drain. I stared out through my windshield and winter faded before me. Summer grew out of it like a flower, the brown grass sprouting green and full and lush, the smell of purple violets everywhere.

And then, as if from a great height, I saw Luke’s old blue truck struggle up the mountain road, come to a grinding stop. Then a girl in a white dress stepped out of it, turned and waved, her long brown arm raised high against the rippling wall of summer green that rose behind her. I felt myself descend toward her, like a bird out of the clear sky, my fingers like curved talons. Then suddenly she vanished, and it was night again, warm and clear, and in the distance, a grim, motionless tableau, three figures frozen in a gray light, one of them with her arms folded over her chest, the other two staring at her, waiting, as if for a cat to spring from the undergrowth.

But Mary Diehl did not spring at anyone that night. She simply turned on her heel and strode away, leaving Kelli and Miss Carver standing mutely in the parking lot.

From my place beside the auditorium’s plain brick wall, the word “love” still aching in my ear, I watched as Mary shot past me, her head erect, her arms held stiffly at her sides. She walked quickly, as if she might break into a frenzied trot at any moment, so that as she passed under the nearby lamp, I could glimpse her only as a ghostly blur, her pale skin oddly luminous for just an instant before she vanished into the covering darkness.

When I looked back toward the parking lot, I saw the headlights of Miss Carver’s car click on, bright and blinding, as they shot toward me.

I remember that I shrank away from them, as if afraid of being seen, and fled around the far corner of the auditorium. Standing there, covered in darkness, my back pressed tightly against the brick wall, I heard the gravelly sound of Miss Carver’s car as it pulled away, then made its way down to the main road, swung left and headed toward town.

After that, I had only the silence that lingered, and the echoing word Kelli had spoken so bluntly moments before:
love
.

And so I confronted exactly what Mary had confronted, though not openly as she had done it, facing Kelli squarely as she’d fired her question like a bullet between her eyes, but as a figure in the distance, shrouded in the covering night, cowardly, sullen, and now more utterly devastated than at any time before. For I had heard it from Kelli’s own mouth, and so whatever doubts I might have allowed myself before that instant had been swept away. Not only was Kelli not mine, she was clearly and irrecoverably
his
.

I ran to my car, drove out to the main road. I intended to drive home, but as I stopped at the edge of the mountain road, I found that I could not do that. The prospect of going there to lie in my bed while wave after wave of desolation swept over me was more than I could bear. And so I turned right and headed up the mountain.
I sped all the way to the top, then down again, then back up, and finally pulled into an overlook and sat staring down at the scattered lights of Choctaw until, as the hours passed, they began to grow dim in the morning haze, and then, like separate stars, blink out one by one.

Now, as I sat in the driveway of Miss Troy’s dilapidated house, staring at its small, lighted windows, the rain steadily beating down upon its rusty tin roof, I could remember that wrenching night with absolute clarity. But I could remember the next morning, too, and all the days that followed, moving hour by hour toward that moment when Kelli would get out of Luke’s old blue truck and head down the slope “to meet someone” as Luke had always believed, though at the same time assuming that whoever it was she’d intended to meet that day had never come.

It was hard to imagine how swiftly those days had actually passed, even though they had seemed excruciatingly slow to me at the time. School had limped along, the teachers growing weary with the long year and the prematurely hot weather. Their assignments had melted into nothing, so that only the play remained in focus, and with it, Kelli and Todd, and perhaps even Mary Diehl, though she had dropped out of it by then, unable to bear what I had to bear every afternoon and evening, the terrible spectacle of Kelli and Todd together on the stage, Kelli now mounted on a plywood balcony, Todd beneath her, arms raised beseechingly beneath a flurry of papier-mâché leaves, their eyes always intently concentrated upon each other.