swept out from it and finally the low curb that rose along the edge of the smoothly paved street. I saw Rosie glance to the left, her eyes widening in what must have been a moment of supreme terror and unreality as the car plunged toward her through a screen of rain.
“So a single act is like a stream, you might say,” Luke went on. “It spurts up out of the ground, and after that it just runs on forever.”
My mind was still concentrated on Rosie’s shattered body, the way it had felt in my arms when I’d lifted it from the stretcher. “When I picked her up,” I said, “she felt like a bundle of broken sticks.”
“What?” Luke asked, his voice suddenly very tense. “Picked who up, Ben?”
I turned toward him, unable to answer.
“What is it, Ben?” Luke looked shaken, as if I’d taken him to the verge of a terrible revelation, and I realized that he’d thought I meant Kelli, that it was her body that had felt like a bundle of sticks, something I could not have known unless …
“Rosie Cameron,” I answered quickly.
Luke’s face regained its color. “Oh,” he murmured.
I nodded toward the place where it had happened. “I delivered her, you know. I put her in Sheila’s arms.” I could recall the great satisfaction I’d felt in handing Sheila her newborn daughter, how radiant she’d looked as she’d taken Rosie to her breast, so different from the rigid figure behind the dark glasses who is Sheila Cameron now. Her husband Loyal had stood beside the bed, beaming down at his wife and daughter. After a moment, Sheila lifted the child toward him, and he took her carefully into his arms while Sheila looked on. For an instant, they seemed to reach a moment of supreme happiness so uncomplicated and complete that it had the look of something fixed and eternal.
Luke shook his head. “Terrible accident,” he said. “And then everything that happened after it …” He gnawed his pipe stem for a moment, then repeated, “Terrible accident.”
I knew better, of course. I knew from what source the black stream had come, the one Luke had just been talking about, the poisonous stream that bubbles up in a single thoughtless moment, and then flows down through the generations. “We have to be so careful,” I whispered.
Luke looked at me sharply. “Careful about what, Ben?”
I gave him the only answer I knew. “Everything.”
And I thought of Kelli Troy, of how early she must have grasped some intuitive sense of that endless stream of wrong “our fathers” had seen more clearly than ourselves. Or why else would she have risked so much to do the right thing?
THE RIGHT THING, AS IT TURNED OUT, WAS TO ACT AGAINST her fear. But I didn’t know that until she finally told me herself.
It was the first week in April, and I found her sitting in the
“What’d you think of it?” I asked a little stiffly as I sat down at my desk. She had been so withdrawn during the last few weeks that I hardly expected more than a crisp, peremptory answer.
“It was beautiful,” Kelli said, her voice less distant than it had been recently. “What did you think about it?”
It was the first real question she’d asked me since that night in Gadsden. I stopped what I was doing and turned to her, no longer able to keep my feelings inside. “Do you really care what I think?” I asked bluntly.
She did not look surprised by the question, or by the disgruntled, accusatory tone in which I’d asked it.
“I haven’t been very nice to you lately, I know,” she said. Her eyes were very dark, and in the strangely intimate light of the little basement office, they took on an earthy richness of tone and color. Instantly, as I realize now, my hope of one day marrying her was powerfully rekindled. But also, and quite abruptly, I had a brief, intense vision of taking her to the crest of Breakheart Hill, lowering her onto a deep, red blanket … and all the rest.
“I’m sorry about the way I’ve been acting, Ben,” Kelli said.
I hardly heard her. For I was on Breakheart Hill, swept away, with all of Choctaw below me, and Kelli beneath me, staring intently into my eyes while her fingers played in my hair. For a brief, hallucinatory instant, I had it all, and every bit of it so real and fully realized that it seemed more like a memory than a fantasy.
“I haven’t been nice to anybody lately,” Kelli went on. “I guess lots of people have noticed.”
The vision shattered, and I was once again in the uninspired basement office, with Kelli sitting only a few feet away, her fingers nowhere near my hair, but cradling a small paperback book instead.
“Yes, they have,” I told her. “Miss Carver thought you were in some kind of trouble.”
“I was,” Kelli said forthrightly.
I was startled by her sudden admission. Pursuing it struck me as a way of moving her into my confidence, at last. “You were?”
“That night in Gadsden threw me off a little.”
“In what way?”
“It scared me, Ben. That boy, the one with Eddie.”
“Lyle Gates,” I said. “He’s not really a boy.”
“He looked like a boy,” Kelli said, “but what you said about him, it scared me.… And I’ve heard other things since then. That he beat up a boy during a game and got thrown out of school. That he tried to kidnap his daughter. That he had a gun when he tried to do it.” She looked at me intently. “Is all that true, Ben?”
“I guess so,” I told her, “but it doesn’t matter. He doesn’t know you, or what you were doing in Gadsden that night.”
She pulled her chair up slightly and leaned toward me, her eyes intense. “I know that,” she said, “but he still made me afraid to do what I’d intended to do that night.”
“So that’s what’s been bothering you—Lyle Gates?”
“Not him, but the way he made me feel.”
“How?”
“Like a coward,” Kelli said. Then, as she had so many times before, she reached into her book bag and handed me a folded sheet of paper. “But I don’t want to be a coward. I don’t want to go through life like that, disappointing myself and everybody else, being afraid.”
I started to put the paper away, intending to read it at home, as I always did, but Kelli didn’t want it that way.
“Would you mind reading it now?”
“I thought you didn’t like to be around when I read your stuff.”
Her face was eerily calm, nearly motionless, but I knew that she was exercising a great deal of control to keep it that way. “This time I do” was all she said, and even this she said quietly, with no sense of how much there was at stake.
It was only two pages, all of it written in her tiny script, but within that limited framework she had caught much that had escaped me. She had seen the stiff placards flapping in the cold, the dark faces beneath them, somber and determined, the lighted windows that served as backdrop, throwing the marchers into even deeper shadow. She had noticed the forlorn clothing they’d worn that night, how feebly it had protected them against the cold, and even more, how its very inadequacy suggested what she called “the hand-me-down quality of the life they are resisting.”
Her rendering of that life stung me. The words were simple and direct, in a style that was not exactly Kelli’s, but which she had adopted in order to speak about what she perceived to be the great issue of our youth:
We are young now, all of us at Choctaw High, and because we are young, we are not expected to think much about what is going on throughout the South. But that night in Gadsden, I saw people our age who had thought about their lives, and who wanted to change them. They had decided that they could not afford to be young, and in their eyes, there was a maturity that is not in our eyes. They are as young as we are, but their past, what they have lived through, has made them throw off their youth earlier than they should have needed to. And so they look older and more serious than we look. This has made them beautiful.
I remember glancing up at Kelli when I read that last sentence. She was sitting with her hands in her lap, her eyes very steady, her face infinitely quiet.
