Breakheart Hill

was still sitting in the circular drive, my father behind the wheel, his face poised over its wide black arc. He nodded, lifted a finger, then jerked the car into gear and pulled away.

Mr. Arlington had already arrived when I got to the classroom. He didn’t speak to me as I came through the door, but continued the job he’d already begun, taping pictures of Jefferson Davis and Abraham Lincoln on opposite sides of the blackboard.

I took my usual seat near the middle of the room while Mr. Arlington went on with his task. On that day, he was the same age I am now, but he seemed terribly old to me, overweight and stoop-shouldered, with a wife who looked like the female version of himself.

Before each class, Mr. Arlington would take off his jacket, pull down the tie, and roll up his shirtsleeves, as if teaching us were more a physical than an intellectual labor. He taught history, and in teaching it, he clearly relished the fact that he could occasionally impart what he took to be its Big Ideas. Grandly he would declare that those of us who did not learn from history would be doomed to repeat it. He said that history taught us various things, that power flowed into a vacuum, for example. He never hinted that outside Choctaw High these were commonplace ideas, little more than scholarly cliches, and certainly he never let on that he’d snatched them from the books of considerably wiser and more accomplished men. To some extent, I think he liked to play the role of intellectual mentor, while at the same time he must have realized that outside the closed world of a small-town high school he would hardly have struck an impressive figure. For beneath all the classroom posture, there was something self- conscious about him, something hesitant and deeply insecure. When caught in an error, he would color visibly, then turn toward the blackboard in order to conceal it. In class, he focused on debacles, usually military ones, moving at times disconnectedly from the Spanish Armada to Pickett’s Charge. I saw him as a buffoon and an impostor as a teacher. Because of that, the one lesson I might have learned from him—that it is possible to make a fatal error— was completely lost on me.

The only other student in the room was a girl named Edith Sparks. She was dressed in a light blue blouse and black-and-white checked skirt with black pumps and white socks, and she’d taken her usual seat at the back of the room.

“Hi,” I said to her.

Edith regarded me distantly, as if slightly intimidated at being spoken to by one of the school’s “smart kids.”

“Hi,” she said softly.

She was not one of the “popular” girls, not one of the Turtle Grove crowd whose father was a doctor or a lawyer, owned a textile mill or sat on the board of one of the town’s banks. She was reasonably pretty, however, though only in the unstylish, countrified way of those girls who lived along the brow of the mountain, wore their lusterless brown hair to their waists and walked down the mountain road to school each day, clutching their books to their chests in the same way they would soon be clutching the first of their many brown-haired babies.

“The summer went fast,” I said.

She nodded. “Yeah, it did,” she said, then smiled shyly, as if wanting to continue the conversation, but at a loss as to how to do it.

I’d known her since elementary school, but always as someone who lived within the blurry corners of school life, the type who took the class in home economics and seemed destined to marry a boy who took shop. She would live out her life in Choctaw and raise children like herself, a fate that struck me as inconceivably forlorn.

Now, when I think of Edith, it is as a figure seated in the witness stand, her voice barely audible as she answers the questions put to her by Mr. Bailey. She is wearing what she must have thought of as appropriate courtroom dress, absurdly formal, complete with a dark pillbox that she’d no doubt borrowed from her mother. I can see her eyes dart nervously as Mr. Bailey questions her:

And where did you see the defendant, Miss Sparks?

Coming out of the woods.

Whereabouts?

Right there at the top of Breakheart Hill.

What was he doing?

He was wiping off his hands.

With what?

A handkerchief.

Do you remember the color of the handkerchief?

It was white.

Could you see what he was wiping off his hands?

Yes, sir.

What did it look like, Miss Sparks?

Blood.

It was then that she’d glanced over to the defense table, then quickly back to Mr. Bailey, carefully following along as he led her toward that climactic moment when she pointed her trembling index finger squarely at the accused, and in a voice just loud enough for the room to hear it, uttered her final answer: Him.

I still see Edith around Choctaw from time to time. She has aged prematurely, as farm women often do, with liver spots across her brow and the backs of her hands. She wears her hair in a bun and clothes herself in homemade dresses. We nod when we see each other. Her smile is as shy as it ever was, though now it reveals a scattering of stained teeth. We never speak. Still, as she passes by, I find that I cannot help but wonder if she ever hears the whir of a pickax as it slices through the summer air, or relives a single moment of her time upon the stand, the one instant in her life when the town actually took notice of her.

But on that first day of school so many years ago, I found no reason to pay much attention to Edith Sparks, nor ever expected to find any. Certainly I felt no sense that another human life might someday rest within her primly folded hands.

“I’m glad you got here a little early, Ben,” Mr. Arlington said when he finally turned away from the blackboard. “There’s something I wanted to ask you.” He leaned toward me, both hands resting on his desk. “What would you think of being this year’s editor of the Wildcat?”

The Wildcat was the school newspaper, and as far as I could remember, Allison Cryer had always run it pretty much by herself.

“I thought Allison was the editor,” I said.

“Allison’s family has moved to Huntsville,” Mr. Arlington told me. “That’s why I’m looking for someone to take over for her.” He hesitated a moment, as if reluctant to pay a compliment. “I noticed some of your writing in class last year, and I think you can handle it.”

I said nothing, so Mr. Arlington added, “Editing the Wildcat’s not much work. And there’ll be a faculty adviser. A new teacher, a Miss Carver. She’ll give you all the help you need.”

I shrugged. “Okay,” I said unenthusiastically, though in fact I felt honored at being chosen, grasping as I did in those days for any hint of recognition.

“Good,” Mr. Arlington said as he began to gather up his things. “You’d better get to the assembly now.”

There were no more than a hundred people in Choctaw’s senior class that year, and according to custom, they occupied the first two rows of the assembly hall. Luke sat only one row in front of me. He winked playfully when he saw me take my seat with the other juniors.

The assembly hall was a large auditorium, complete with a curtained stage. It was the scene of almost all the school’s communal gatherings, everything from the pep rallies before the Friday night football game to the inspirational speeches of visiting guests. A wooden lectern rested at the center of the stage, and after everyone was seated, the school’s principal stepped up behind it.

“I want to welcome all of you to Choctaw High School,” Mr. Avery said. His eyes swept down upon the first two rows of seats. “Especially to the senior class.”

There was a raucous cheer, then an almost grudging return to silence as Mr. Avery continued, droning on about the coming year, ticking off the lengthy list of responsibilities that would be placed upon us. It was an exercise that seemed unbearably monotonous to me at the time, but which I have since recognized as Mr. Avery’s effort to form us into something solid, mold our misty, insubstantial personalities into the stuff of character.

“So you will be challenged in many ways this year,” he said in conclusion, “and I hope that you will learn how