yellow grass.
She was still ahead of me when she reached the end of the road. She turned and waited, smiling slightly, a single curl of hair over her right eye.
“It’s over there,” she said when I came up to her. She pointed first to a small clearing, then beyond it to a large granite boulder. “That’s where she hid,” she said.
“Who?”
“They named her Lillith.”
“Who did?”
“The people who lived near here. Thomas and Mary Brandon.”
She motioned me forward. Together we made our way to the clearing, then to the enormous gray stone that loomed above it.
Kelli pointed to a small pebbly ridge of earth that rose from the base of the stone. The space between the ridge and the stone was no bigger than a fox’s lair, and the years had all but completely filled it in with leaves and twigs.
“This is where she stayed that day,” Kelli told me. “She watched it all from right here.”
She eased herself onto the ridge of earth and leaned back against the stone, her eyes now turned toward the slender blue line of the road we’d driven down.
I started to sit down beside her, but thought better of it. And so I strolled over to the nearest tree and leaned against it.
“I read about it in a book about this part of Alabama,” Kelli said. “It tells all about things that have happened around here.”
“What happened to Lillith?” I asked.
“She died a long time ago, but before she died she told about what had happened to her when she was a little girl. Before the Civil War.”
“We call it the War Between the States,” I told her lightly, feeling somewhat more at ease with her now.
She smiled again. “Well, this was a long time before the War Between the States,” she said. She pointed to the north, farther down the valley. “There was a Cherokee village about three miles from here, and that’s where Lillith lived. She’d forgotten her Indian name by the time she told her story, but she could remember a lot about how she’d lived.”
That life, as Kelli went on to describe it, had been peaceful enough. The Cherokee had been farmers, and they had lived in an agrarian style that had not been terribly different from the white farmers who, over the years, had slowly come to surround them. One of those farmers had been Thomas Brandon, and he had become friendly with the tall Cherokee brave Lillith remembered as her father. The two men had “smoked together,” as Lillith had put it, both in the Cherokee lodge and in Brandon’s log cabin at the mouth of a stream she identified as Lewis Creek.
“That stream,” Kelli said, pointing to it.
I glanced down at its slender, nearly motionless flow, and suddenly it seemed to take on the vaguely sinister and tragic aspects of the “rain-dark alleyway” in Kelli’s poem.
“They decided to move the Indians out of this area,” Kelli went on. “All the Indians had to pack up and head west.” Her eyes drifted up the valley to where, it seemed, she could almost see pale lines of smoke still rising from the Cherokee settlement. “So they did,” she said. “Except for Lillith’s father, who refused to be driven from his home.” On the day before the soldiers came, he mounted his horse, pulled Lillith up into his lap and headed out of the village.
“She remembered being scared at first,” Kelli said, “mostly because of the grim look on her father’s face, but after a while she saw that they were headed toward Thomas Brandon’s house.”
Brandon’s cabin was actually in view when her father brought his horse to a stop along the eastern bank of Lewis Creek. Lillith remembered him lowering her down slowly, dismounting himself, then walking her hand in hand to the edge of the water.
“He told her to take a drink from the stream,” Kelli went on. “To do that, she had to get down on her stomach and hang her head over the bank.”
Lillith did as she was told, lying flat in the grass, lapping at the water, until she felt her father’s hand at the back of her head, pressing her face farther down into the water.
“He had decided to drown her rather than let her be taken by the soldiers,” Kelli told me.
Lillith began to struggle, and even in old age, when she told her tale, she remembered the ferocity of her movements, the desperate fight for air, the sounds of splashing water and even the fleeting sight of a green fish as it fluttered by in terror.
It had ended with a sudden, deafening roar, and the sight of her father’s face crashing into the water beside hers, his eyes open, staring, a plume of blood rising from the wound in his head.
“She pulled herself out of the water,” Kelli said, “and saw Thomas Brandon a few yards away. The rifle barrel was still smoking in his hand, she said.” She paused, then added, “Brandon later told her that he’d simply come upon a man trying to kill a child, but that he hadn’t realized it was Lillith and her father.” She shuddered. “The next day the Brandons hid her beside this rock,” she said.
And it was from that small earthen burrow, she added, that Lillith watched the long line of her people as they drifted past her toward the West, hundreds of them, wrapped in blankets, walking, or on horseback, or joggled in wagons, and with no more than a few soldiers as their escort.
Kelli stood up and began lightly slapping bits of forest debris from her skirt. When she’d finished she glanced out over the valley. “I’d better be getting home now,” she said.
We walked back to the car together. The sun was lowering toward the western ridges by then, scattering its fading light over the opposing mountainside and into the yellowing fields that stretched the whole broad length of the valley floor.
It took only twenty minutes or so to reach Collier, and on the way I continued to feel oddly moved by the story Kelli had told me. But I was troubled by it, too, for I had wanted, and perhaps even expected, her to point out the glories of someplace I might yet go rather than something grave and mysterious about the place I’d lived in all my life.
“Have you read a lot about this area?” I asked.
“A couple of books, that’s all,” Kelli answered.
“Well, maybe you could write up the story of Lillith for the
Kelli nodded.
“Terrible story,” I added. “A father who tries to kill his daughter.”
She had been staring straight ahead, her eyes on the open road, but she suddenly turned toward me. “It came out of love, though,” she said with an unexpected fierceness. “That makes all the difference, don’t you think?”
I couldn’t answer then. Now I can. I see Mr. Bailey standing before the jury box, his hand lifting the photograph toward the twelve faces that loom behind it. I see their eyes stare at the picture he has presented to them, a young girl’s body as it lies twisted in a pool of vines. I hear his voice ring out again:
THE TROY HOMESTEAD LOOKED MUCH AS IT HAD ALWAYS looked, a small farmhouse with a wraparound porch stocked with several old wooden rocking chairs. Miss Troy sat rocking quietly in one of them as I pulled into the drive. The stylish clothes she’d worn so many years ago when she’d come into my father’s store had been cast aside by then, exchanged for the plain green dress and white apron she wore that afternoon. She was in her forties now, and as she came toward my car, I could see streaks of gray in her hair.
“Thanks for taking me home,” Kelli said as she got out of the car.
By then her mother had stepped up to the car and was peering in at me.
“Mom, this is Ben Wade,” I heard Kelli say.
The suspicion in Miss Troy’s face gave way slightly. “Luther Wade’s son?” she asked, still staring at me.
