“What’s he doing here, anyway?” I asked.
“Just checking things out, I guess.” Eddie took a final draw on his cigarette, then tossed it to the ground. “You seen Todd?”
“No.”
He lifted himself from the hood of the car, his feet sinking into the gravel with a soft crunch. “I hope he didn’t leave without me,” he said worriedly. He glanced around for a moment, as if trying to formulate a plan. Then he darted quickly out of the lot and up the cement walkway that led to the entrance of the school.
Watching him go, I could not have imagined that much would ever become of him, but Eddie is a successful local mill owner now, and there is talk that he will run for mayor. Each time we meet at the hospital or at a football game or sometimes while shopping at the new mall, he stops to pump my hand vigorously, in politician style, though with him it seems less false. He flashes his customary smile. “Remember when we were kids at Choctaw High?” he always asks. He shakes his head playfully, remembering a time of life that no doubt always returns to him with an air of uncomplicated joy. “Remember all the fun we had?”
“I remember,” I tell him.
The smile broadens until it seems to cover his entire face, and a great cheerfulness sparkles in his eyes. “Boy, those were great days, weren’t they, Ben?” he says.
And as he says it, I see him as he was that night, a boy of seventeen again, his reddish hair glowing with a diabolical sheen, his green eyes trained on the grim severity of my face, his voice coming toward me through the smoldering summer darkness, tense and edgy. What are you saying, Ben?
CHAPTER 6
SOMETIMES, IT BEGINS AT THE VERY END, AND I AM WALKING across a broad green lawn. I can see Luke beside me, his face in profile as it moves in tandem with mine, like two horses harnessed together by a dark leather strap. Together, we bear our burden to the appointed spot, then watch as it is eased downward into the red, clay earth that makes up the Choctaw Valley. The casket is a pale gray, and because of that, it seems to dissolve into the earth, vanish, as if it were a mist. Luke stands beside me, his hands folded in front of him. His eyes are not moist, and he does not speak, but I can see the tension in his fingers, the way they grip and release, grip and release.
I glance around at the people who have joined us at the grave site. Sheila Cameron stands like a pillar of black stone, and not far from her, Eddie Smathers is dressed inappropriately in a light blue summer suit.
Miss Troy stands directly in front of me, and when it is over, she steps to the very edge of the grave and tosses a single white rose onto the gray casket below her. Then she makes her way over to Luke and me, takes each of us by the hand and squeezes fiercely. “Kelli loved you boys,” she says.
I stare at her, amazed by the force of life that still surges from her, the enormous reserves of strength and courage I can see in her eyes and feel in the fiery grip of her hand, and in that instant, the full force of what was lost sweeps over me like a boiling wave.
At other times it returns to me on no specific memory. I rise from my bed and walk out into the field behind my house. The fields are plush or barren, alive with seedlings or crackling with already withered corn. In that world everything appears perfectly calibrated, with nothing left to chance. Above, the sky remains changeless, the stars like silver pegs firmly nailed into the darkness, the planets circling in their iron rings, theirs the gift of fixedness, ours the gift of flux, they without will, we without direction.
Once, not long ago, my daughter Amy came out after me.
“You should get some help,” she said.
“For what?”
“The insomnia.”
“It happens only once in a while,” I told her. “It’s nothing to worry about.”
“But it makes you tired. Irritable, too, sometimes.”
The face of Mary Diehl swam into my mind, her eyes raw and sleepless, glazed in fear, her voice a breathless whimper: Please don’t tell anybody, Ben.
I looked at Amy. “Be careful,” I told her.
She stared at me quizzically, unable to follow so abrupt a command. “Careful?” she asked. “About what?”
I shook my head, unable to answer her or even guess where I might begin an answer.
“In everything,” I said with a quick shrug.
She continued to watch me closely, worriedly. “Are you okay, Dad?”
“I’m fine,” I assured her. Then I drew her under my arm and we stood together for a long time, the night wind shifting frantically to and fro around us like a hunting dog working desperately to pick up some vanished trail.
After a time, we returned to the house. Amy went back to her bedroom, but I knew I still couldn’t sleep, so I went to my office instead of going upstairs. I sat behind my desk, then swiveled around to face the large bay window that looks out toward the mountain. It was a deep fall night, but I could feel a wave of heat pass over me, as if, behind the black curtain, the sun had taken a single menacing step toward me. For a long time I remained in place, silent, almost immobile, like a naked man locked in a furiously steaming room, waiting patiently, as if for some unknowable next move.
The wave passed after a few minutes, leaving me in the throes of so penetrating an exhaustion that I felt as if every muscle within me had been exercised to its limit. I drew in a long, restorative breath, and felt the slow recuperation begin again, a cyclical process that has continued through the years, and which as it goes forward always leaves some part of me behind, a portion of my suit of armor rusting in the field.
And suddenly I was young again. All of us were young. I saw us splashing about in the nearby river, Luke swinging from a rope that dangled over the nearly motionless water while Betty Ann clapped loudly from the adjoining bank. I saw Todd carried off the playing field upon the shoulders of his teammates, Mary watching breathlessly from the wooden bleachers a few yards away. A hundred separate scenes flashed through my mind: Eddie hungering after Todd’s attention, eager to follow his every command, Sheila chatting happily about the college man she would later marry, a circle of admiring girls gathered around her, listening enviously. I saw Luke and Betty Ann stealing kisses in the dark space behind the front stairs, eyes open, glancing about for some patrolling teacher they feared might spot them there. And though I understood that what we had not known of life at that time could have filled a thousand volumes, it still seemed good that we had known so little, that for a brief hour we had lived in the grip of nothing more threatening than the coming dawn. Then suddenly I saw Kelli, her face wreathed in the same trouble Luke had glimpsed that day as he’d driven her up toward Breakheart Hill. I saw everything that had led up to that moment, and everything that had followed from it. And I thought, No, youth is more illusion than we need.
THE FIRST ISSUE OF THE WILDCAT WAS PUBLISHED ONLY A week or so after Kelli handed me her poem. In appearance it was almost identical to the paper Allison Cryer had headed during the preceding two years, the same crude drawing of a growling wildcat festooned across the top of the page, the Alabama state motto, Audemos ius defendere, “We Dare Defend Our Rights,” inscribed on an equally crude banner at its paws.
The content was pretty much the same as well, except for Kelli’s poem. It was on the third page of the paper, nestled between a sports story and a “blind item” gossip column which a girl named Louise Davenport had volunteered to provide for each issue.
I remember being somewhat excited when the first issue arrived from the local printer, and I know that the only reason for that excitement was the fact that Kelli’s poem was in it. It was not only the first poem ever printed in the Wildcat, it was also, as I had no doubt, the most interesting thing that had ever been in it.