But nothing like that ever happened on Breakheart Hill. Something else did. Something that continually weaves through my consciousness, slithering into my mind from this corner or that, but always returning me to the past with a terrible immediacy, as if it had all happened yesterday and I was still reeling from the shock.
At times it begins with Sheriff Stone standing before me, his eyes slowly scanning the bare concrete walls of the little office where I worked on the high school newspaper. At other occasions it has begun with the sound of my father calling to me from the mountain road, his tall figure veiled in thick gray lines of rain. It has begun with my being ushered into a musty, cluttered room, an old woman’s voice coming from behind, ancient, gravelly, and unspeakably ironic in what she says to me. Thank you, Ben, for doing this.
At still other times it comes to me in a dream of that last day. It is midafternoon, and a breeze is rustling through the grass of my front yard. Across the way, my neighbor’s son blows a dandelion into the shimmering air, and suddenly in my mind I see Luke’s old truck come to a stop on the mountainside. He takes off his blue baseball cap and wipes his brow. He says, “You sure?” She says, “Don’t worry, Luke.” Then she smiles at him and gets out of the truck. He lingers a moment, reluctant to leave her. “Go on, Luke,” she tells him. He nods, jerks into gear, then pulls away, the old truck lumbering down the hill toward town, a puff of blue smoke streaming from its dusty tailpipe. She watches him from her place at the edge of the mountain road, her hand lifted in a final wave, her bare arm weaving like a brown reed against the green wall of the mountain. She smiles slightly, as if to reassure him that she is safe from harm. Then she turns away and heads down the slope toward Breakheart Hill, disappearing finally into a web of trees.
Sometimes the dream ends there, too, with a faint smile still lingering on her lips. At other times, however, it goes on irrevocably, step by step, all the way to the instant when I see her body as it crashes through the dense forest growth, her legs torn by briar and shrubs, her face slapped mercilessly by low-slung branches. She runs desperately, dazed and terrified, her body bent forward as she rushes back up the steep grade of Breakheart Hill. At times she stumbles, her fingers clawing madly at the rocky ground until she pulls herself to her feet again and struggles forward, staggering up the slope, toward the point where the high ridge levels off at the mountain road, where she hopes Luke, by some miracle, may have returned for her. She is almost there when she falls, exhausted, unable to move. In the last moments, I see her face pressed hard against the ground, her snarled hair littered with bits of leaves. I see the shadow fall over her, watch her face twist around surreally, rotating slowly into an 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. What was Kelli doing on Breakheart Hill that day? What was she looking for in those deep woods alone?
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. I know how much you loved her, Ben.
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 face and blurt out, “Get in the truck, Ben, I want to show you something.”
The “something” he wanted to show me was usually some natural oddity bizarre enough to attract his attention. Once he took me to a field which, as we approached it, seemed to bubble with a thick black oil. It was really locusts, enormous black ones, thousands of them, which, he said, had swept in from Texas and would be gone by morning. There were other odd visions that attracted him: a field of smooth white stones, for example, that was actually a pond in which hundreds of fish had suddenly surfaced, belly-up and dying, killed, as my father told me, by “some kid” who’d used a portable generator to electrify the water.
I still don’t know what effect such scenes had upon my father. I was never even sure what drew him to them. I do know that human disasters attracted him with the same steady call as natural ones, although I never saw any sign that they had any more lasting impact.
But they did on me. Or at least one of them did.
It was the single worst calamity that ever struck Choctaw, and in the park, on a Saturday evening, the old-timers who gather at a place called Whittlers Corner still talk about it.
One night in the middle of July 1954, a family of twelve set out in two narrow boats from a small, wooded island in the middle of the Tennessee River. It was very dark, and the boats had no lanterns to mark their positions. Somewhere along the way they lost track of each other in the darkness, began to cross paths, and finally collided at a place almost exactly halfway between the island and the farther shore. In the terrible confusion that followed, all but the husband had drowned—eleven people, a wife, a grandmother, and nine children ranging in age from seven months to sixteen years.
Two days after the drowning I heard my father’s truck pull into the driveway, then his voice calling to me from outside. “Come get in the truck, Ben. I want to show you something.”
I did as I was told, and we headed up the side of the mountain, driving briskly along its curling road until we passed onto the broad plateau of farmland at its top. On both sides of the road, I could see tin silos rusting in the tall, dry grass, and miles of barbed-wire fence running in thin brown scars across weedy, unplanted fields.
It was midafternoon when we arrived at my father’s destination, a small country meeting hall which, from the look of it, had once been a barn. A few pickup trucks and old cars rested here and there around the building. They were dusty and battered, and I knew that the people who drove them were the hardscrabble farmers who struggled to live off the barren lands through which we had just driven.
Three or four men lingered in the doorway of the building, most of them dressed in overalls. They nodded to us as we passed by.
Inside, there were a few other people, but it was not the living that caught my attention, it was the dead. I had never seen so many of them in one place. They seemed to fill the room, draining off its light and air. They were arranged along the walls, all eleven of them, their coffins growing in size from the tiniest, which held the body of the seven-month-old infant, to the largest, the one that held the family’s drowned grandmother. All of them were open, and from the doorway I could see eleven faces rising toward the dusty ceiling, their eyes closed, their lips puffed and oddly purple, their skin a chalky yellow.
One by one, my father led me past each coffin, pausing slightly, glancing down. The baby looked the most natural of them all, its small body sunk low in the coffin’s nest of ruffled white silk. We passed a three-year-old girl, then a four-year-old boy, then up through the ages of man until we reached the family’s oldest victim, her gray hair pulled back behind her head, her cheeks rouged, a pair of cheap store-bought reading glasses perched ridiculously on her nose.
When it was over, I waited for my father to say something, but he didn’t. Instead, he wandered over to where the surviving father stood in a knot of other men. He was a short, stubby man, and he looked stunned not so much by the sheer magnitude of what had happened to his family as by the sudden attention the tragedy had brought in its wake.
“I’m Arthur Loomis,” he said, stretching his hand toward my father. “I’m much obliged for your coming.”
My father took Loomis’s hand. “Well, it’s a terrible thing,” he said quietly, “but, you know, there’s a lot the little ones won’t ever have to know.”
Mr. Loomis nodded, then released my father’s hand, the words washing over him without effect, then disappearing into the gray air.
But to me, my father’s words lingered shockingly. What was it, I wondered, that these “little ones” would never have to know? What did my father know about life that was so terrible that sudden death in the very young could be thought of as a blessing?
My father idled awhile with the men in the building, but I walked outside instead. For a time, I wandered aimlessly among the old pickups, then drifted around the side of the building, and finally behind it.
Once I turned the corner at the rear of the building, I saw a small house. It was not much more than a shack, with a tin roof that was badly rusted, and a front porch that sagged to the right. A young man stood a few yards from the porch. He was tall, and rather thin, with hair that shone almost silver in the midday light, and I could see that he was watching me intently. For a long time he stood in pla
ce, his body weaving from side to side as if being gently pushed left and right by invisible hands. Then he laughed in a keening voice and moved toward me, a length of rope trailing behind him at the waist, its far end tied securely to one of the porch’s supporting posts.
I drew back reflexively and suddenly felt a hand on my shoulder. I glanced up and saw a tall woman in a flowered dress, her skin brown and leathery, but her eyes very sharp beneath the high green bonnet.
“Nothing to be afraid of,” she said, clearly indicating the boy in the front yard. “That’s just Lamar.” She smiled quietly and stroked my hair. “Nothing to be afraid of,” she repeated, “he’s just Jesus in disguise.”
I thought of that phrase again as I headed down the mountain toward Choctaw that night so many years later, my father long dead, the burning ruin of the old church miles behind me. I could feel my memory heating up like a great furnace in my brain, and after a moment I pulled onto the side of the road, trying to gather it all together. From where I’d stopped, I could see all of Choctaw below me, a glittering necklace strung between two dark mountains, and in that instant it seemed to be just as Kelli had once described it, the whole world, with everything that could be known of life gathered within its tiny space. Once again, I heard the old woman say, “He’s just Jesus in disguise.” And I realized that over the years that single phrase had come to me again and again. I’d heard it when little Raymond Jeffries first appeared in my office, his arms and legs crowded with dark bruises, and still later as I’d lifted Rosie Cameron from the stretcher, felt her shattered bones beneath her skin like tiny tubes of chalk and realized that she was dead. I heard it as I’d peered back down the long corridor and glimpsed Mary Diehl sitting mutely in her white room. It’s just Jesus in disguise, I’d repeated in my mind, and by that means absolved myself from all that had been done to them. But most of all I’d heard it on those summer nights when I’d gone out on the porch, sat down in the swing, closed my eyes and seen the face of Kelli Troy. And suddenly I realized that down through the years it had worked like an incantation, a magical phrase I’d used not to open a door and thereby release all that lay trapped inside, but to keep one tightly closed.