impossible angle. It is then that her eyes lift toward me. They are filled with a dark amazement, staring at me questioningly until the lights within them suddenly blink out.
And I wake up. I recognize my house, the wife who sleeps trustfully beside me, the adoring daughter whose picture hangs on the wall a few feet from my bed. In the darkness, I glance about silently, my eyes taking in the surrounding room. Everything appears steady, ordered, predictable, the night table in its proper place, the mirror where it has always been. Beyond the window, the street remains well lighted, the road straight and sure. All that lies outside of me, the whole external world, seems clean and clear compared to the boiling muck within. My house, my family and friends, the little valley town I have lived in all my life, I can maneuver my way among all these things as smoothly as a fish skirts along the bottom of a crystal stream. It is only within me that the water turns murky, thickens and grows more airless each time I relive that long-ago summer day.
But I relive it anyway, my mood darkening with each return, a descent that confuses those who have lived with me these many years, particularly my wife, who senses that on those occasions when I grow distant and walled in, it is because something inexpressible has tightened its grip on me. Oddly enough, it is also at those moments when she seems to renew her attraction for me, as if, at its heart, gravity were romantic, that perhaps even more than youth or beauty, it has the power to rekindle love. And it is at that instant, perhaps more than any other, as my wife lies naked at my side, that Kelli Troy returns to me. Not as a body lying in a rippling pool of vines, but as she was while she was still herself, young and vibrant, filled with the high expectations that ennobled and inflamed her. And I see her on the mountainside, her body sheathed in green, balanced like a delicate white vase on the crest of Breakheart Hill.
I think that it is in this pose that Luke most often sees her, too, a vision that inevitably prompts one of the many questions that have lingered in his mind through the years, and which from time to time, when we are alone together, he will voice suddenly, his eyes drifting toward me as he speaks.
CHAPTER 2
BUT THAT AFTERNOON, AS WE SAT ON THE PORCH TOGETHER, Luke had a different question, one that, in its own peculiar way, I found far more threatening.
“Have you ever told Amy about what happened on Breakheart Hill?” he asked.
He meant my daughter, who is now the same age Kelli was in May of 1962. She was sitting only a few yards away, curled up in a lawn chair, reading silently beneath the shade of the large oak tree that towers above the yard.
I shook my head. “No, I haven’t,” I said.
Luke seemed surprised. “Why not?”
I couldn’t answer him with the truth, that whatever story I might tell my daughter would have to be a lie, and that it was really Luke himself who most deserved to hear the truth, since it was his incessant probing that had never let me rest, that had continually plucked at the slender thread that bound our lives together, year by year, unraveling it a little, and with it, the fabric of a long deception.
“It’s never come up,” I said, then moved quickly to a different story, briefer and with that philosophical edge that I knew Luke enjoyed. “You know Louise Baxter, don’t you?”
Luke nodded.
“She brought her little boy in to see me last week,” I told him. “He’d just come back from a trip to Venezuela.” Then I went on to describe how the boy’s right thigh had been hideously swollen, the skin stretched tight over a large boil that had taken on a sickly yellow color.
“It looked dangerously infected, and I knew it had to be cleaned out,” I continued. “So I gave him a local anesthetic, then made a cut over the head of the boil and pried it apart.”
Luke nodded, waiting for my point.
“The inside of the boil was red, of course, very inflamed, but right in the middle of it there was a small fleck of pale green, and when I touched it with the tip of my scalpel, it flipped away from the blade.”
Luke suddenly looked more engaged.
“So I took a pair of tweezers and pulled it out.” I looked at Luke wonderingly. “It was a worm.”
“A worm?” Luke asked.
“Yes,” I said. “I looked it up in a book I have. It turns out that this particular worm is a common parasite in South America.”
It had wriggled savagely between the metal tongs, and as I’d watched its green body twisting maliciously, it had taken on a terrible sense of menace, as if, in this small worm, I had glimpsed some malevolence at the core of life.
“And I just said to myself, ‘There it is, there is evil.’ ”
Luke thought a moment, then dismissed any such windy notion. “No, that was just a worm, doing what worms do,” he said. He let his eyes drift up toward the mountain. I knew that I had not succeeded in drawing him back from that summer day so long ago. “I should never have let her go into those woods by herself,” he said.
“She wanted to,” I told him. “You had to let her.”
“Something was bothering her. I could tell that.”
“She was high-strung.”
“No, I mean she had something on her mind. I guess that’s why I didn’t want to leave her there. The way she looked, I mean. Troubled.”
I drew in a deep breath, but said nothing. It was the same description Luke had offered many times before, each time relating every detail in the same unvaried order, like a detective incessantly returning to the scene of the crime, as if by one more pass he might find the key to what happened there.
“I guess that’s why I wanted to wait for her. But she said no. So I asked her if she wanted me to come back for her a little later. She said no to that, too.”
I nodded silently.
“She was sure about that, Ben. She said, ‘No, you go on home, Luke. You don’t have to come back for me.’ ”
But he’d gone back anyway, though several hours later, and only after calling Miss Troy to find out if Kelli had returned home. And so it was Luke who’d found her lying in the vines, Luke who’d bent down to check for any sign of life, Luke whose faded jeans had soaked up a small portion of her blood.
He watched me intently. “The look on her face, Ben. When I found her, I mean.” He shook his head. “It was like her soul had been scooped right out of her.”
I glanced away from him, but not toward the mountain. “There was a fire over at Lutton last night,” I told him, once again changing the subject. “An old, abandoned church. I thought I might drive over and take a look.”
Luke smiled quietly. “That’s the sort of thing your father used to do, isn’t it? Go to where something had burned down or been blown away by a tornado.”
“You want to come along?”
Luke loosened the knot of his tie. “No,” he said. “I better stop by the nursery on the way home. I have some seedlings to put in. Probably be working there till late into the night.” He got to his feet, moaning slightly as he rose. “My back’s been bothering me a little.” He offered a thin smile. “Old age creeping up.”
I nodded, then watched as he headed down the short walkway to his car. Once he’d reached it, he turned back toward me, gave a short wave, then got in and drove away.
And so that evening I went to Lutton by myself, driving slowly up the winding mountain road, then over its crest and onto the plateau that swept beyond it, until I found the old church in its blackened ruin. I stared at it awhile, my eyes moving emptily from one pile of charred rubble to another, until I couldn’t stand it anymore and headed back toward Choctaw.
On the way home, my thoughts turned to my father, the night he’d found me in the rain, the feel of his arms around me, the comfort of his voice.
He had not been the sort of man who’d taken me hunting and fishing, as Luke’s father had often taken him, but from time to time he would come through the front door, a look of unusual anticipation and excitement on his
