and in whose presence I felt more like an insect than a person, small to the point of invisibility.
And yet it was finally Kelli Troy who seemed the most remote of all.
As it turned out, we had only one class together, Miss Carver’s, but I saw Kelli often during the day, sometimes standing at her locker, sometimes sitting on the front steps, sometimes heading toward the line of yellow buses that waited in the school driveway in the afternoon. She took the one that headed toward Collier, a rural community some ten miles from Choctaw, and she always sat near the front, either reading or staring silently out the window. She hadn’t spoken in class very often, and we had never done more than greet each other casually outside it, but that first allure still clung to her, and in any group my eye would single her out, as if in a large tableau she had been painted by a separate hand, one that was stronger and more skilled. In class, I listened to her comments more carefully than I listened to the others, and more carefully responded to them. I held back smiles, not wanting to appear boyish, and compliments, not wanting to fawn upon her. I had entered that early, vaguely calculating stage of secret courtship in which you premeditate and approve every word and gesture, and yet I can’t say that at that early point I was swept away by her. There is a kind of love that penetrates you painlessly, like the tiniest of needles, working its way through you so slowly and secretively that you do not feel it as a sudden sting, but as a steadily intensifying atmosphere.
So it was with Kelli Troy.
Still, there are times when I imagine it another way, as a sudden, heaving passion, the two of us in the grips of a love like Catherine and Heathcliff’s, the one I was reading about in
Or this less improbable rendering: A letter comes. It is from the medical school of a great university in Boston or New York. There is a place for me. There is money for me. I show it to Kelli, then take her naked shoulders in my hands. I say, “Come with me.” She draws herself more tightly into my arms and presses her face against my chest, and I know that her answer is yes.
At other times, the same hands reach out for the same bare shoulders, but she does not face me. Instead, she is running up the steep slope that leads to the mountain road, running like they ran, the ones she later told me about, the ones who gave their name to Breakheart Hill.
For what really happened never truly leaves me, no matter how often my imagination insists upon rewriting it. I hear the blow that echoed through the trees, see her fall to the ground, then rise and begin to stagger up the killing slope, arms reaching for her as she lunges through the undergrowth. I hear her moan as she sinks, exhausted, to the ground, then the sound of footsteps as they close in upon her from the crest of Breakheart Hill, and finally her last words, spoken as the final glimmer of her consciousness flickered out. And after that each life returns to me, each life that was destroyed in the deep woods that day, their faces circling in my mind, one behind the other, like heads on a potter’s wheel.
A FEW YEARS AGO LUKE SUDDENLY TURNED TO ME. “WHERE do you think it all started, Ben?” he asked. We had just finished putting away the grill after a Sunday cookout with our families, and I had no idea what he was referring to.
“What started?” I asked.
“Whatever it was that led to Breakheart Hill.”
I stared at him silently, unable to speak, surprised at how abruptly he had brought it up again, how tenaciously he had refused to let it go, as if that first doubt, the one I’d glimpsed so long ago, had opened a hole within him that nothing since had filled.
Luke shifted, motioning me toward two lawn chairs at the far side of the yard. “I think about it sometimes,” he said as we walked along together. “About where it started.”
Suddenly I recalled the look on his face the afternoon it had happened. Even from a distance, as he’d climbed out of his truck and come toward me, I’d recognized the change that had come over him. His face was somehow more deeply lined, as if he’d aged instantly at the sight of her. But his voice, in its wounded bafflement and incomprehension, still sounded young.
I glanced toward the line of white roses he’d planted along the fence of his backyard. “I guess everything has a beginning.” I spoke almost casually, despite the fact that I could feel something rise in me, a prisoner clamoring for release. “Even something like that,” I added, trying to relieve the building pressure.
Luke did not look at me, but I could sense the restlessness that had suddenly enveloped him. “Maybe especially something like that,” he said as if sternly reminding himself of his purpose. “A specific cause. One thing.”
It was at that moment I realized that Luke had never believed the founding tale of his own religion, that all evil flowed from one immemorial sin so that each one of us was merely one small drop in the river of souls that had flowed out of Eden, the origin of the harm we did untraceably remote. He was not seeking the comfort of such distance or the peace of its acceptance. He was stubbornly looking for the truth.
I felt a sudden grave appreciation for the frankness of his quest, and in a moment of unguarded admiration I released a clue. “Maybe it began with something innocent,” I told him.
His eyes shot over to me. “Like what?”
I recalled that first connection and improvised an answer. “Like a poem, for example. That first poem she wrote.”
Luke continued to stare at me, but said nothing.
“I mean, if she hadn’t written that first …” I began, then felt a stab of fear, the old secrecy gather around me once again, and stopped.
Luke looked at me quizzically. “What?”
I shook my head. “I don’t know.”
I think he must have seen the dread in my face, because he glanced away, eased himself farther back into his chair and fell silent for a long time. Sitting beside him, I could feel the doubt that had never left him from that first moment he’d rushed across my yard to tell me what he’d seen at the crest of Breakheart Hill. He’d barely been able to speak, but he’d struggled hard to do it, sputtering desperately that “something bad” had happened to Kelli Troy. His eyes had concentrated on my face with a terrible fierceness as he’d labored to get it out, repeating again and again,
“Those roses I planted last year are really going strong,” Luke said quietly after a moment.
A wave of relief swept over me, as if I’d been granted a stay of execution. “Yes, they are,” I told him. And for all the peace it might have granted him, I could not tell him more.
BY THE SECOND WEEK IN OCTOBER I WAS PUTTING THE finishing touches on the first issue of the
The small room the school had set aside for the