he’d suddenly found himself in a world whose colors and dimensions were absolutely foreign to him. Even his voice had seemed soft and childlike as he’d described what had happened that day, the way he’d found Kelli lying facedown in the vines. She’d been trying to say something, he’d told the court, repeating a single phrase again and again, like a chant. He’d bent down to listen more closely, bent down to hear the last words that came from her:
“The story never made sense to me,” Luke said, suddenly drawing himself back, as if from a point of no return, but with his eyes still leveled motionlessly on mine. “Did it to you, Ben?”
I heard his question clearly, but I couldn’t answer it then.
Now I can.
PART TWO
CHAPTER 9
WINTERS IN THE SOUTH ARE BLEAK, AND NOT LONG AFTER Sheila Cameron’s Christmas party, winter settled in upon Choctaw with a raw and unforgiving earnestness. During that time, the town seemed like nothing so much as a small ship reluctantly at rest in its winter port, bobbing in the occasional wave, swept by the occasional wind, but otherwise motionless and dormant.
As usual, there were cold rains that winter, and they often turned to sleet, though rarely to snow. Tiny streams trickled from the metal awnings of the dry goods and jewelry shops that lined the town’s main street, and the cardboard political notices and advertisements that had been stapled to the wooden telephone poles grew sodden and began to peel away.
Except for the pines, the trees were bare, and the creeks and ponds, often frozen over, seemed locked in the same icy stillness that gripped the town, their clay banks now hard as granite in the cold. It was as if the brilliant colors that had enlivened fall and summer had been drained from the landscape, creating a world of brown and gray.
Not surprisingly, life took on a similar dullness, with most of the townspeople holed up in their homes and business places. The streets and park were generally deserted, the residential yards empty, the stone courthouse like a gigantic tombstone, gray and frozen.
In early January my father took to wearing a thick wool sweater, even with a fire blazing only a few feet away. Sitting in his chair, his feet sunk deep in a pair of old house shoes, he would read and shake his head, read and shake his head, though he rarely mentioned the nature of the story he was reading. Once, however, he looked up after a long round of head-shaking to tell me that if the Freedom Riders came to Choctaw, I was to stay clear of the bus station, and that on no account was I to join “that bunch,” as he called them, that might gather there in order to intimidate the riders.
“A person has a right to ride a bus,” he said in conclusion, the only comment he made as the South approached that terrible summer of 1962.
As for things at Choctaw High, they were as fixed in the same wintry stillness as the rest of the town. The football season had ended, and although the basketball season was in full swing, the games were sparsely attended, and the Friday pep rallies that had preceded each football game had given way to dull end-of-week assemblies in which Mr. Avery listed the usual complaints about chewing gum and smoking in the bathroom.
Under the pressure of this wintry monotony, relationships that had flourished throughout the preceding months began to unravel. Eddie Smathers broke up with Debbie McNair, and Sheila Cameron broke up with Loyal Rhodes, her college man, though she returned to him a short three months later.
But more than anything, it was the breakup of Todd Jeffries and Mary Diehl that set tongues wagging in the corridors of Choctaw High that winter. It was as if an ideal had been shattered, leaving those couples who remained together feeling more vulnerable. I remember seeing Mary walking in a kind of daze through the noisy high school hallways, her books held like small shields against her chest, her face frozen in a look of stunned disbelief. As for Todd, I would sometimes spot him trudging wearily across the school parking lot, head bent against the icy winter wind. His friends surrounded him protectively, however, particularly Eddie Smathers, who had his own romantic troubles.
Even Luke and Betty Ann had their problems that winter, though they never actually broke up. Instead, they complained about each other, Luke that Betty Ann sometimes flirted with other boys, Betty Ann that Luke often paid too little attention to her. But even in their battles, they struck me as curiously comfortable with each other, as if some line had been drawn early on that neither would ever cross. Perhaps they had found a form of young love that even in its youth was strangely old, more settled and enduring. Or perhaps it was simply that Betty Ann never felt for Luke what Mary Diehl felt for Todd Jeffries, never assumed that in losing him she might be losing everything, and so never became subject to the terrible diminishment Mary faced each time she faced losing Todd. For why would she have fought for him so furiously, clung to him so desperately, if she had not believed that without him she was nothing?
“Mary looked like a ghost that winter,” Noreen once said to me. And she was right, although it was not Mary who occupied my thoughts at that time, but Kelli, though with perhaps the same sense of dread Mary must have felt each time she thought of losing Todd.
For I knew that in such a volatile situation, with so many couples breaking up, it was inevitable that a few unhinged males would approach Kelli, and they did. Eddie asked her out on a date the second week in January, but Kelli said no. The following week, Malcolm McCoy, Dr. McCoy’s wastrel son, made a play as well, and was also turned down. A few others came forward tentatively, then ricocheted away from a rejection that seemed imminent.
Throughout January and February I watched them come and go, and at each approach I felt a mounting wave of fear. Even so, I remained reluctant to approach Kelli myself, not only afraid that she would turn me down just as she had the others, but that I would be left more exposed afterward than they had been, ridiculed and made fun of, since to love someone who does not love you is the only tragedy we laugh at and deride.
So I was stymied, unable to approach Kelli as Eddie and the others had, and because of that, forced to seek a different, less direct way. It was during this time that I began to imagine winning Kelli by bizarre and fantastical means. I imagined her deathly ill, but saved by a cure I was able to discover in the nick of time. After that, she would certainly fall in love with me. I imagined winning prizes and scholarships, becoming instantly famous. After that, I supposed, she would certainly fall in love with me. I knew that such scenarios were preposterous, and even childish, but they swam into my mind anyway, lingering there for hours at a time as I lay in my bed, my eyes trained on the dark ceiling.
At some point, although I do not know when or how, these various and at times ludicrous fantasies converged into one compelling idea, the notion that at some point there would be a “right moment,” and that in that instant I would act in such a way as to win Kelli’s love forever. I imagined it as a scene of electrifying drama. In an act of sacrificial courage, for example, I might save her from drowning, pull her from the path of a speeding car or rescue her from the clutches of a bully I continually imagined in the form of Carter Dillbeck. Something would change between us after that. Kelli would begin to look at me in a different way. A spark would be ignited, the sort that burned in Mary Diehl’s eyes when she gazed at Todd Jeffries, for example. All that was required was some situation in which I could show myself, demonstrate my courage, the fact that I alone would never disappoint her. After that, she would be mine.
I drifted among these fantasies for quite some time before a wholly different notion took hold, one that was far more aggressive, and which was no doubt born of the increasing frustration I felt at being continually near Kelli, but unable to touch her, or even to tell her what I really felt. And so I decided on a more direct course of action. Instead of waiting passively for the “right moment” to emerge, I would actively seek ways to expose Kelli to danger, consciously move her toward peril. Then I would rescue her from its clutches.
