found out why.
“You know, for the first time I don’t feel like the new girl in school,” she said.
“I’m glad.”
She looked at me hesitantly, as if considering whether she should say more. “At first I was afraid that I wouldn’t like it here,” she said softly. “Coming from a big city, you know, and moving to a small town.”
I gave her my best sardonic smile. “Well, I guess Choctaw has its charms.”
“It’s taught me something,” Kelli said.
I could not imagine life in Choctaw teaching anybody anything.
“It’s taught me that basically every place has the whole world in it,” Kelli said. “Everything that happens happens everywhere.” She thought a moment longer, then added, “But maybe in a small place, a slower place, you can see it better.”
Suddenly Choctaw was as romantic a place as had ever been, or ever would be, and I knew for a certainty that it was Kelli who made it so. I felt a great yearning rush through me, wash over me like a wildly tumbling waterfall, and I knew then that Luke had been right some weeks before, that this was what it was to be in love.
She reached over and gave my hand a quick, affectionate squeeze. “See you in school,” she said. She started to get out of the car, stopped, quickly opened her purse, pulled out a sheet of paper and handed it to me.
“Something for the next issue,” she told me, “if you think it’s any good.”
I took the paper from her, then watched her swiftly cross the short distance from the car and disappear into her house. But I lingered in her driveway, unable to leave. I wanted to be in the same darkness she was in, feel the same tingling chill, hear the same breeze as it swept along the fields behind her house. In the car alone, watching her home for those few seconds before I pulled out of the driveway, I felt the exquisite agony both of her nearness and her distance, and I can say now, after the passage of three decades, that it was the most delicious torment I have ever felt, the single, searing instant when, in all my life, I was most fully alive.
The lights were still burning inside her house when I finally forced myself to pull out of the driveway and return home. As a drive, it seemed very long, as if I were moving through a steadily thickening darkness, rich but also frightening, since I realized that Kelli was the only person I’d ever felt this way about, the one person I could not leave behind.
Once at home, as I had done before, I took what she’d given me and read it:
When I think of it now, it strikes me as odd that the poem didn’t alarm me in the way it demonstrated Kelli’s attitude toward Choctaw, how at home she had begun to feel within what I had always taken to be its pinched and arid world. And yet, it didn’t. I didn’t feel that I was losing her when I read it, that she was “going over to the other side,” or even that she had been unconsciously seduced by small-town life. Just the opposite, in fact, so that for the first time, I began to think that living with her in Choctaw, being married to her, having children and growing old with her, all of it in Choctaw, that this was the life I really wanted. I would still go to medical school, but after that, I could return to Choctaw, set up a small practice, become the beloved village doctor. I was able to envision the quiet honor that would accompany such a life, its daily pleasures and rewards, with Kelli always at my side.
I suppose it was at that point that I actually began to direct my efforts toward winning Kelli Troy, marrying her, making a life with her in Choctaw. I don’t know what methods I considered using for accomplishing that goal, but I do remember that over the next few months the notion of one day marrying her grew steadily in my mind, that at some point it took a conspiratorial direction, and after that, one might almost say that it metastasized into a full- fledged plot.
And it is as a plot that I have continued to think of it during all the time that has passed since then.
Some years ago, when Amy was still quite young, I bought a small cabin on the rim of the mountain. In the late afternoon, she often played in the front yard while I stretched out in the hammock I’d hung on the front porch. Lying on my back one evening, I watched a spider spin its web in the far corner of that same porch. Gracefully, its long slender legs wove a perfect and nearly invisible conspiracy of space and fiber. It struck me that here was a creature that lived almost exclusively by entrapment, that much of nature lived by the same grim but irreducible principle, and that perhaps at base, so did man.
I said as much to Luke a week or so later as we sat together one evening while our children played in the yard only a few feet away. Luke cast his eyes out over the valley, then shook his head. “That leaves out accident,” he said. “It leaves out the fact that sometimes things just happen on the spot.”
“Maybe things don’t happen on the spot as much as we think they do,” I answered.
Luke’s soft blue eyes settled on the steep ridge that had turned nearly purple in the evening shade. I could see that something had suddenly darkened his mood, and that he was fighting to put it into words.
Unaware of the turn his mind had taken, I tried to help him with another quick remark. “Maybe accidents don’t play such a great role in life.”
Suddenly, his eyes shot over to me, fiery in their intensity, as if someone had lit a fuse in his brain. “Then what about Kelli Troy?” he asked in a voice that was unexpectedly demanding. “What about Lyle Gates? I mean, the way they happened to be on Breakheart Hill that day.”
I instantly recalled Lyle as he’d taken the stand on the last day of the trial, how he’d claimed to have seen Kelli as she’d passed by in Luke’s truck, then a few minutes later heard a low moan as he’d reached the upper slope of Breakheart Hill, but that he had not followed her there, nor done her any harm.
“He had some evidence to back him up,” Luke added. “I mean, his car had been repossessed the week before, just like he said in court. So it probably was an accident that he was walking up the mountain in the first place.”
“Maybe.”
“And if Lyle hadn’t been walking up the mountain,” Luke went on, “he wouldn’t have seen Kelli at all that day. And if he hadn’t caught sight of her, well, then—” He stopped, thought a moment, then added, “That always bothered me, the way even Mr. Bailey had to admit that Lyle hadn’t planned it.
“And the way Lyle looked when he took the stand,” Luke said when I didn’t respond, his voice now more urgent than I had ever heard it, as if his memory were a knife point pressing him forward relentlessly. “Remember that, Ben? Remember how Lyle looked?”
I remembered very well. He’d seemed oddly small, like a child in a man’s suit, a baffled look on his face, as if
