No one in the class gave the slightest hint that anything she’d said was worth hearing, and in response, Miss Carver fell silent for a moment, her eyes lowering somewhat, as if she were searching for the key that might unlock us. In that pose, she looked terribly young, hardly more than a girl, frightened and unsure of herself, as if waiting for us to leap at her, to tear her limb from limb. Later it would strike me that a deep innocence had surrounded her that morning, that it was like the soft sheen I have since noticed in newborn skin, and that because of it, it would never have occurred to me that she was far more knowing than she seemed to be, more able to discern the hidden pathways and secret chambers within those she came to know, or that through the dense, hovering gloom that shrouded Breakheart Hill, Miss Carver would be the first to glimpse the truth.
THE REST OF THAT FIRST SCHOOL DAY WENT BY IN A STIFLING, muggy haze. It was the first week of September, and as usual in the Deep South, the weather had remained quite hot. The school had high windows, and the teachers kept them open to give us what relief we could get from the limp breezes that sometimes wafted through them. But there were no fans in the school, and certainly no air-conditioning, so that by the end of the day, when the final bell rang and we staggered out into the open air again, we felt as if some long, dull torture had at last come to an end.
Luke was standing beside his truck when I reached the parking lot. He pulled off his cap and wiped his forehead with his bare arm. “Can you believe this heat?” he asked.
I shook my head at the hellishness of it.
“I thought they might let us out early, but hell no, we had to go through the whole day.”
I nodded. “I saw that girl,” I told him. “The one in the park when we were playing tennis.”
“Yeah, me, too,” Luke said. “In the hall a couple of times.”
“She’s in my English class.”
Luke grabbed the collar of his shirt and tugged it from the skin around his throat. “I can’t believe they didn’t let us out early,” he said again. “Anyway, let’s go down to Cuffy’s and get something cold.”
We got into Luke’s truck and seconds later pulled out of the parking lot. I glanced toward the school as we went by it, already hoping, I suppose, for a glimpse of Kelli Troy, but letting my gaze settle on the school as well. It seemed unbearable that I still had two years to go, and I know that when I drew my eyes away, it was with the disquieting sense that my imprisonment within its high brick walls and gabled rooms would never end.
I see it differently now, from the viewpoint of a different kind of prison. It has been closed for nearly twenty years, replaced by the much larger and more modern building my daughter attends, one with sleek, unblemished halls, state-of-the-art lighting and winking computer screens. No plans exist either to reopen it, or to tear it down, so it continues to stand where it always has, an abandoned ruin at the foot of the mountain, though now adorned by the flower garden that Luke, in his continuing effort to beautify Choctaw, has planted on its broad front lawn.
Sometimes in the evening, when I’ve come down the mountain from the small, rural clinic I visit twice a month, I’ve let my eyes drift over toward the old building’s unlighted face, its silent bell tower robed in vines, its redbrick walls slowly crumbling into dust. At those moments, I’ve tried to imagine what it must look like inside the building now, with the wind slithering through cracked windowpanes, prowling the empty rooms and corridors, and finally lifting a ghostly dust up the broad staircase that rises to the second floor. I see no one, not even shadows. I hear none of the voices that once echoed down its hallways, nor even so much as the familiar sound of padding feet, groaning stairs or the clang of metal lockers. All I sense is its profound emptiness. It’s then that I’ve felt the urge to make the decision our town’s administrators have yet to make, to call in the wreckers with their heavy balls and pounding hammers, and let them do their work, administer, at last, the long-awaited coup de grâce.
Then I’ve glimpsed the flowers Luke has planted along the deserted walkway, small blooms in a great darkness, and thought, Not yet.
CHAPTER 5
IT IS ODD HOW MANY THINGS CAN BRING IT ALL BACK TO ME, sometimes even the most inconsequential things, perhaps no more than a chance remark. Only a few hours before I joined Luke at Miss Troy’s funeral, I examined a man in his early seventies who was complaining of shortness of breath, something he called a “summer cold,” but which could have been anything from a relatively minor allergic reaction to heart failure. The exchange that followed was entirely routine.
“Do you smoke, Mr. Price?” I asked.
“No.”
“Have you been having this trouble for a long time?”
“The cold, you mean?”
“The shortness of breath.”
“Awhile, I guess. But this time it was different.”
“How was it different?”
“Well, it was fast, the way it come on me. All of a sudden, I just couldn’t get a breath.”
“Where were you when that happened?”
“Walking across the pasture.”
“In high grass?”
“Weeds mostly. And those little yellow flowers, the ones that grow all around.”
“Goldenrod.”
“That’s right. They’re all over the place. Especially this summer, the way it’s dragged on so long. Reminds me of the one we had back in ’62.”
And with that one innocent reference, past and present collide, and I smell the violets again, feel the lingering heat of that summer long ago, and with it, the sharp urge that seized me so powerfully.
“You were still in high school back then, I guess,” the man says. He smiles wistfully. “Lord, at that age, the girls sure are pretty.”
And suddenly I see Kelli standing alone in a wide field of gently swaying goldenrod, her face very still, thoughtful, as if she is considering some aspect of a future she will never have. In such a pose she seems every bit as fiercely self-possessed as she was, confident of what lay ahead, with no sense that something might be lurking in the deep, concealing grass.
I feel my lips part with a whispered “So young.”
The man looks at me curiously. “What’s that you say?”
“Nothing,” I tell him, and the vision disappears, replaced by the sound of sirens as the ambulance and police cars rush up the mountain road to the place where Luke has summoned them, a sound that never really fades after that, but wails on through the generations.
“Nothing,” I repeat as I begin to examine him again. But I know that it is everything.
THE SUMMER OF 1961 SEEMED TO LAST FOREVER. THE HEAT dragged on through the month of September, and the leaves remained green long past their season. It became a major topic of conversation in Choctaw, the men in the barbershop endlessly pondering the strangeness of it, the preachers marveling at God’s hand, the way He could stop the motion of the world, turn the seasons into fixed stars. October came and went, and still the green held its place, though toward the end of that month, the first lighter shadings began to outline the ridges that hung above us, and after that, the first yellows appeared, quite suddenly, as if sprinkled over the mountainside in a single night.
The human world went on as usual, of course. Slowly, the students of Choctaw High accepted the school routine. Mr. Arlington gave his first test, and before handing them back, he read one of my answers to the class. “Very well organized, Ben,” he told me, while several of my less well-organized fellow students winked at one another and shifted in their seats.