I SUPPOSE THAT SOME PART OF ME WAS STILL SWIRLING IN THE eddies of this sensual undertow when I arrived at Kelli’s house a few hours later. When I think of it now, I see myself in a kind of swoon, and there are even times, despite all that has happened since then, when I cannot think of it without a hesitant and very slender smile. For surely, in a certain sense, there is nothing more comical than teenage love. But the smile can hold its place only for an instant before it vanishes into that more forbidding truth, that there is nothing more deadly earnest either.
Certainly, I know that I was in deadly earnest as I joined Kelli that day, and that all during the lunch that followed I felt as if small explosions were continually going off in me. It was as if Lyle’s blows had dislodged something inside of me, a vital part that had always been tamped down but which now stormed restlessly all about, beating against my inner wall.
But for all my inward upheaval, I presented an outward face that could hardly have seemed more calm. I joked about my “war wounds,” as I called them, and dismissed the notion that in fighting Lyle Gates I’d done anything exceptional. Not only that, but I quietly assured Kelli’s mother that Lyle would never ask for more trouble, that she need not fear his knock at her door.
“Lyle’s basically a pretty good person,” I said magnanimously. “He won’t cause Kelli any more trouble.”
Both Kelli and her mother looked relieved by the time lunch ended. Miss Troy even thanked me for what I had done for Kelli.
After lunch, Kelli flung a light sweater over her shoulders, and I noticed that she’d slipped a small black camera into one of its wide pockets. “I thought I’d take a few pictures up on the hill,” she explained as she headed for the door.
It was nearly two in the afternoon by then, but still unseasonably warm, as it would be from then on. Miss Troy followed us outside, her arms bare for the first time in many months.
“Tell your father I said hello,” she said.
“I will.”
She smiled. “Such a good man, your father.”
Thirty years later she would say the same thing, standing beside me in the town cemetery on another spring day almost as warm as that one, but with her arms covered by the sleeves of a plain black dress. She’d come in from Collier to be at my father’s funeral, and she looked older and considerably more weary than she’d ever looked before. “Such a good man, your father,” she told me quietly at the end of the service. She took my hand and squeezed it, and as she did so a thought seemed to come to her mind. Her eyes bored into me for a moment, then she said, “Ben, I was wondering if I could talk to you sometime soon.”
I nodded. “Of course you can, Miss Troy.”
Three weeks later she would appear one morning in my office near the courthouse, and ask a second question, one that for all its mild and unthreatening content would shake me to the bone.
But thirty years earlier, as I climbed into my dusty gray Chevrolet, it would never have occurred to me that Shirley Troy might one day be in a position to ask a question that could instantly fill me with a chilling dread. I saw her only as Kelli’s mother, a woman who’d done her job well, raised a daughter under difficult circumstances and through it all maintained a tight grip on her dignity. That she might later haunt me with her kindness, or give my life its single most harrowing instant, none of this could have seemed possible as she stood beside my car that morning so long ago.
“Well, see ya’ll later,” she called to Kelli and me as we pulled away.
It was just warm enough to keep the windows down as we drove to Choctaw, and as I glanced toward Kelli, I noticed that she’d not buttoned her sweater, but had left it draped loosely over her shoulders.
“You must think summer’s already here,” I said.
She nodded slightly. “Do you plan to have children, Ben?” she asked suddenly.
“I hope so,” I answered, without in the least suggesting that I also fervently hoped that they would be hers as well.
“My mother says that there’s no love like the one parents feel for their children,” Kelli said. “She says it’s different from what people feel for their parents or the people they’re married to.”
“In what way?”
“She says it’s more intense.”
“You really
Kelli nodded. “What about you? Do you talk to your father?”
“Not really.”
She looked at me closely. “Who do you talk to, Ben?”
I looked at her as sincerely as I ever had, then uttered the last truth she would ever hear from me. “You,” I told her. “Only you.”
I will always remember the smile that came to her face at that moment, how very sweet and uncomplicated it was. It was the last truly gracious moment we would have together, the instant at which I most nearly felt her love.
WE ARRIVED AT BREAKHEART HILL A FEW MINUTES LATER. Kelli got out of the car, slipped off her sweater, plucked the camera from its pocket and laid the sweater neatly on the car seat.
She was wearing a sleeveless white dress, the same one she would wear several months later, a fact that Sheriff Stone noticed when he glimpsed the photograph I took of her that day, then later taped to the wall of the basement office. By then he’d found the car tracks at the bottom of the hill and so he knew that someone other than Lyle Gates had been on the ridge that day, and I can still remember the muted accusation in what he said as he stared at the picture.
I had never “taken” her there, as I explained to him, and on that particular day, as I quickly added, she had taken me.
Which was true enough, of course. And yet, when I think of that afternoon, of the unseasonable warmth and the wild array of spring buds that surrounded us, I know that by “taken her there” Sheriff Stone had meant to suggest what my actual feeling was toward Kelli Troy, that it went well beyond the “friendship” I described to him so matter-of-factly in the basement office that day, and in which I am sure he never for a single moment believed.
And so, I know now, that as Kelli moved away from me, edging her way down the hill and into a flurry of tiny fledgling leaves that seemed to swirl around her like a light green snowfall, she was unconsciously entering the stage set of a play whose lines I had already written, a manufactured, hothouse tale not of doomed, but of triumphant love. Following behind her, my eyes fixed hungrily on the sway of her body as it shifted effortlessly among the clinging branches, I watched her descend into my own dark fantasy.
She was halfway down the hill before she stopped and turned back toward me. “It began all the way down there,” she said, turning back toward the slope, her arm outstretched, a single finger pointing down to where the slope suddenly fell sharply in its dive toward the bottom of the mountain. “The race, I mean.”
“They raced
“Yes,” Kelli answered. “From the bottom to where we are now.”
I glanced down the slope. “So steep,” I said.
She nodded. “Very steep,” she said. “What do you think the distance is from here to the bottom?”
“You mean to where that road is?” I asked, meaning the old, abandoned mining trail that skirted across the base of the mountain and along whose dusty, unused ruts Sheriff Stone would soon discern the fresh tracks of a car.
“Yes,” Kelli answered.
“It’s hard to say,” I told her. “Probably around five hundred yards.”
Kelli nodded. “That’s how far they ran then,” she said. “Five hundred yards, all the way from the road to here.”
I eased myself against a tree and stood watching her. “That’s how far who ran?”
She seemed hardly able to believe her own answer. “The fathers,” she said softly.
