Because of that, I expected the verses to create a little stir at Choctaw High, bringing attention both to Kelli, as the poem’s author, and to me, as the paper’s innovative new editor.
In fact, nothing at all happened. The paper arrived and was distributed. For the next two days I would see students perusing it idly as they sat on the steps or leaned against their lockers, and each time I would look to see if they were reading Kelli’s poem. They never were. Even Luke never read it, or at least not until I shoved it under his nose and forced him to, and after which he merely handed the paper back to me with a quick “Yeah, that’s nice.”
Kelli also seemed to take the poem’s publication without excitement. The day after the paper was distributed, she came up to me in the hall, thanked me politely for including it, then quickly darted up the central stairs to her next class.
A week passed, and during that time I waited for some reaction, but beyond Luke’s “nice” and Kelli’s hurried “thank you,” there was nothing.
Then, late one afternoon, I turned from my small table in the Wildcat office and saw Miss Carver standing in the door, a copy of the issue in her hand.
“I read Kelli Troy’s poem in the Wildcat,” she said. “The rest of the issue …”
“Doesn’t live up to it,” I said, finishing what I knew to be her thought.
“But maybe it could,” Miss Carver said, nodding. She stepped inside the office. “I’ve already talked to Kelli, and she’s willing to take a more active interest in the paper.” She stopped again, cautious, as if she feared offending me. “I think you two might make a good team,” she concluded.
I said nothing.
“As coeditors, I mean,” Miss Carver added.
She appeared to expect me to resist the idea, perhaps even be offended by it in some way, but I leaped to it instead.
“Well, just tell her to come down here as soon as she gets a chance,” I said.
Kelli came the next afternoon, pausing at the door a moment, just as she had the first time, then uttering her quick “Hi.”
I stood up and walked out into the corridor, the two of us facing each other in the deserted hallway.
“Miss Carver said you were interested in working with me on the Wildcat. I think that’s great. You could add something to it, you know? Something different.”
She smiled for the first time, genuinely smiled, as if she found me amusing.
“Something new,” I sputtered. “Like a perspective. On Choctaw, I mean. A different point of view. Northern.”
Something in what I’d said seemed to strike her. She studied me silently, as if trying to decide if I could be taken seriously. Then she appeared to reach some sort of conclusion. “Do you have a car?” she asked.
“Just an old Chevy,” I told her, “but it runs okay.”
“Do you have time to take a drive?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay,” Kelli said. “I’ll show you something that might be interesting.”
I felt the whole school watching as Kelli and I made our way down the long walkway and headed into the parking lot. That was not the case, of course, although I did see Eddie Smathers do a double take when he glimpsed us, his eyes following us until we disappeared into the old gray Chevy.
“Where are we going?” I asked as I hit the ignition.
“All the way out of town,” Kelli said. “Turn right on Main Street.”
I did as she told me, guiding the car down the street that led directly from the school to the center of Choctaw, then to the right and along a wide boulevard bordered first by dime stores and clothing shops, then by filling stations and used-car lots and eventually by nothing but fields and scattered farmhouses, the town disappearing behind us.
“There’s a place out here,” Kelli said, her eyes now much more intense as she scanned the broad flat land that spread out to the right until it finally lifted toward the mountain. “It’s in the woods, off an unpaved road.”
“We call them dirt roads down here,” I told her cautiously. “I think I know the one you mean.”
We turned onto it a few minutes later, a strip of dry road that moved like a red scar through the pastureland on either side. A film of orange dust had gathered on my glasses by the time we stopped at the end of it. I pulled a handkerchief from my pocket and began to wipe them.
“What are we looking for?” I asked as I put them on again.
“A big rock.” Kelli was peering into the deep woods that rose at the edge of the mountain. “It must be up there somewhere.”
She got out of the car and stared out toward the base of the mountain. “There’s the small stream I read about,” she said, pointing to a narrow trench that cut its way in a crooked pattern from the mountain to the distant road.
I risked a smile. “We call them creeks down here,” I said.
Kelli smiled back, then turned and walked around to the front of the car. I joined her there, watching as she scanned the distant slopes. “It must be just beyond that group of trees,” she said as she started up the road.
I followed behind her, my eyes fixed on the flowing shape of her body as it moved ahead of me, the sway of her hips beneath the dark skirt, the soft, rhythmic seesaw of her shoulders as she made her way toward the end of the road, the thick ebony tangle of her hair. Of the landscape that surrounded her, I remember the mountain as a dappled wall of red and orange, the creek as a dark thread, the road as a deep red cut through motionless fields of yellow grass.
She was still ahead of me when she reached the end of the road. She turned and waited, smiling slightly, a single curl of hair over her right eye.
“It’s over there,” she said when I came up to her. She pointed first to a small clearing, then beyond it to a large granite boulder. “That’s where she hid,” she said.
“Who?”
“They named her Lillith.”
“Who did?”
“The people who lived near here. Thomas and Mary Brandon.”
She motioned me forward. Together we made our way to the clearing, then to the enormous gray stone that loomed above it.
Kelli pointed to a small pebbly ridge of earth that rose from the base of the stone. The space between the ridge and the stone was no bigger than a fox’s lair, and the years had all but completely filled it in with leaves and twigs.
“This is where she stayed that day,” Kelli told me. “She watched it all from right here.”
She eased herself onto the ridge of earth and leaned back against the stone, her eyes now turned toward the slender blue line of the road we’d driven down.
I started to sit down beside her, but thought better of it. And so I strolled over to the nearest tree and leaned against it.
“I read about it in a book about this part of Alabama,” Kelli said. “It tells all about things that have happened around here.”
“What happened to Lillith?” I asked.
“She died a long time ago, but before she died she told about what had happened to her when she was a little girl. Before the Civil War.”
“We call it the War Between the States,” I told her lightly, feeling somewhat more at ease with her now.
She smiled again. “Well, this was a long time before the War Between the States,” she said. She pointed to the north, farther down the valley. “There was a Cherokee village about three miles from here, and that’s where Lillith lived. She’d forgotten her Indian name by the time she told her story, but she could remember a lot about how she’d lived.”