Breakheart Hill

“Will you publish it, Ben?” she asked.

I hesitated. “You know that this could cause you some problems, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

I waited for her to say something else, because I could see an odd restlessness in her eyes, but she remained silent.

“Are you sure you’re ready for that?” I asked. “Because it may not just come from people like Lyle Gates. It may come from other people, people you think of as your friends.”

She answered by asking a question that had probably been in her mind for quite some time. “Why didn’t you ever write anything about what we saw in Gadsden, Ben?”

“I guess I was waiting for you to write about it with me,” I told her.

“Were you afraid?”

Like a blow, I recognized that her first question had been more than an accusation. It had been a challenge to live up to some kind of standard, to face life squarely, bravely, perhaps from time to time heroically.

“Maybe,” I admitted, my eyes now intently fixed upon her, taking in her courage, turning it into mine. “But not now.”

She looked relieved. And I suppose that I felt at that moment what all men feel at that point in life when they dream of winning an unwinnable heart—the need to be good, to be righteous, to be of service, dutiful and brave, to be trusted and commanded, and sent out to slay dragons. It is perhaps the only instant of high romance we can still in truth attain, a moment, however brief, when chivalry is not a fiction from the old time, but the whole force and shaping passion of our lives.

“We will never be afraid again,” I promised Kelli Troy.

Despite the boyish grandeur of my assurance, she seemed genuinely taken by it. “I’ll try to remember that,” she said softly.

Something loosened its grip on me, and I felt myself struggle to keep my eyes from glistening, so deeply did I feel the need to serve her, to rise to whatever occasion might present itself, to be what I had beheld in everything from old movies to epic verse. And so for once I said what I felt in as bold and determined a voice as I could manage at that moment. “I would never let anyone hurt you, Kelli.”

Kelli said nothing else, but only stared at me silently for a few seconds, as if trying to arrive at some conclusion about me. Then she reached into her bag again and pulled out a slender box she’d wrapped in bright red foil. “I haven’t been very nice to you lately, Ben. And so I wanted to give you something to make up for it, and maybe just to say I’m sorry.”

I took the package from her hand. “Should I open it now?”

“If you want to.”

From the shape, I thought it was a tie, but when I opened the box and slowly drew back the white tissue in which it had been wrapped, I saw that Kelli had bought me something far more personal and important.

“A stethoscope,” I said.

Kelli smiled. “I wanted to get you something really special. Something really nice.” She nodded at it approvingly. “It’s a real one,” she added, clearly proud of her choice, “but I guess you can tell that.”

“Yes, I can,” I told her. I hooked the silver earpiece around my neck and ran my finger over the long black rubber tube that led to the tympanum. “It’s wonderful, Kelli.”

“Let’s try it out,” she said, and happiness seemed to surge through her voice. Then she took the tympanum and placed it on her chest.

“Can you hear it?” she asked.

I placed the earplugs in my ears and listened. I could hear the steady, muffled beat of her heart, soft and rhythmic, and suddenly I felt my whole body quicken to its pace, delicate, but thrilling. It was as close to intimacy as I had ever come, and in some sense, I suppose, as close as I would ever come in all the years after that.

I felt my breath quicken. My fingers tightened around the black tube of the stethoscope, and for the first time I felt my physical yearning as something separate from myself, a creature strapped within my skin, pent-up and explosive, barely within the grip of my control.

I quickly pulled the stethoscope away from her chest and turned away. “Your heart sounds pretty strong,” I told her matter-of-factly, carefully aping the tone of an examining physician, scientific and professional, desperate to conceal the disturbing rush that had suddenly swept over me, and in whose stormy eddies I was still adrift. “Very strong,” I repeated as I drew the stethoscope from my ears.

And it was strong, as it turned out, fierce and inexhaustible. But there was another part of her that proved more vulnerable to assault.

It was many years later when I actually saw that part. Dr. McCoy had died several weeks before, and in the course of going through the files he’d boxed and stored away at his retirement, I came upon an old one, its identifying letters faded with the years, but still distinctly visible: TROY, ELIZABETH KELLI.

At first, I couldn’t open it. But after a time, I pulled myself together and took the file to the adjoining room. I held the X-rays I found inside up to the light box. There, in muted patterns of black and gray, I saw the curved box that encased her brain, the column of knotty vertebrae that supported it, the bony caverns from which had shone her eyes, the cartilage that had given her nose its distinctive shape. I also saw what had been done to her: the dark flow of hemorrhaged blood, the skull’s moonscape of lesions, fractures and contusions, a long splinter of broken bone sunk like a white needle into the gray folds of her brain. I stood transfixed before the X-rays’ unflinching record of her destruction, and during those few whirling seconds I relived it all, day by wrenching day, step by wrenching step, until I reached the end, and heard her breathe, Not you.

CHAPTER 13

WE THINK OF IT AS SOMETHING LURKING BEHIND A DOOR. We see it in the glint of a blade or the cold blue muzzle of a gun. It is supposed to come at us from behind a jagged corner or out of a dense, nightbound fog, and we often imagine it as a stalking figure, shadowy and threatening, moving toward us from the far end of the alleyway, watching us with small, malicious eyes.

That is how Mr. Bailey imagined it, and he tried to make it the way the jury would imagine it, too, each of them seeing it again and again as they sat in the Choctaw jury room deliberating upon the fate of Lyle Gates, remembering Mr. Bailey’s final words to them: Only hate can do a thing like this.

But Mr. Bailey had said other things as well, and as I sat in the courtroom that last day, each and every word fell upon me with a dreadful weight.

“You have to see what Kelli Troy saw that afternoon,” he told the jury in that high, ringing voice he so often used during the trial. “You have to see something come toward you from out of the bushes. You have to see a man, bigger and stronger than you. You have to feel the terrible hatred that he has for you, and the damage he has come to do to you. You have to see all of that in his eyes.”

He paused, lowering his voice to that softer, more intimate tone he used just as effectively. “And, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, although it is autumn now, and a cold rain is falling over Breakheart Hill, you have to imagine how beautiful it was on that bright, warm day five months ago. You have to say to yourself, as Kelli Troy must have said to herself, ‘I will never see such beauty again or hear the birds or feel the warmth of the sun.’ You, the members of the jury who have been chosen to render justice in this case, you, each and every one of you, have to do all of that before you can understand what happened to that young girl on that bright, sunny day. You have to see what she saw and feel what she felt and understand what she lost and will never see or feel or have again.”

I am sure they think they did, that as they mused over the events of Breakheart Hill, those twelve men and women saw Kelli’s eyes dart over to an unexpected sound, then widen as they watched Lyle Gates grimly emerge from the thick jungle greenness that surrounded her, his eyes aflame with the hatred Mr. Bailey had already described to them as “brutish and vengeful and probably lustful, too.”

But danger, even mortal danger, does not always look like Mr. Bailey would have had the jury see it on the last day of Lyle Gates’s trial. It is not always a stalking figure with raging, red-rimmed eyes, or even a coolly malicious one, patiently waiting in the shadows. It may be something else, something that calls to you gently, gathers you in warmly, caressingly, something that coaxes you sweetly toward destruction.