He meant to Kelli Troy, of course, and so I answered with my stock reply. “Yes, it is.”
His eyes were fixed on the high wall of the mountain, as if clinging to it for support, and his face took on that odd stillness that always comes over it when he begins to think about it all again. “Hard to believe,” he repeated after a moment.
I nodded silently, unable to add anything further, unable, despite all these many years, to relieve the burden of his doubt, offer him that truth which is said to set us free.
“An awful thing for a teenage boy to see,” he added quietly.
In my mind I saw Kelli’s body as Luke had seen it, lying facedown on the forest floor, her long, curly hair splayed out around her head, a single arm reaching up toward the crest of the slope. I could hear Mr. Bailey’s voice ring out as he’d displayed the last photograph to the jury. This is what was done to her.
And as I recalled it all, I felt that Luke was right, that it was hard to believe that such a thing could have happened, that she could have ended up in such disarray, with her white dress soiled and her hair littered with debris, her right arm stretched out, palm down, fingers curled, as if she were still crawling desperately up the slope.
“I still can’t imagine why,” Luke said softly, though not exactly to himself. His eyes shot over to me. “Can you, Ben?”
His eyes were motionless as they stared at me, and I knew that I had to answer quickly in order to deflect all those other questions that have taunted him through the years, colored his view of life, darkening its atmosphere.
“Hate,” I said.
It was the same answer Mr. Bailey had given so many years before, and I could easily remember the way he’d held the photograph up before the jury, his words washing over them, high and passionate, filled with his righteous anger. This is what was done to her. Only hate can do a thing like this.
Luke continued to watch me steadily. “Maybe so,” he said. “But you know, Ben, I’ve never quite believed that explanation.”
“Why not?”
“Because there wasn’t all that much hate,” Luke said. “Even here. Even then.”
Here. Then. Choctaw, Alabama. May 1962.
At those times when I feel night come toward me like something closing in for the kill, I recall that vanished time and place. In memory, it seems kinder than the one that followed it, but I know that it was not. It was closed and narrow, a small-town world where nothing towered above us but the mountains and the churchhouse spires, nor loomed in distances more vast than those that separated us from the next village streets. Most of the seven thousand people who lived in Choctaw had either been born at the local hospital or in one of the hundreds of farmhouses that spread out along the valley on either side of the town. It was a Protestant world, entirely without Catholics or Jews, a white world despite the small black population that lived, as if in a vague netherworld, on the far side of town. More than anything, it was a world in which we trusted only people exactly like ourselves. And so, when I imagine Kelli plunging through the green, I sometimes see her not as she was that day, a young girl running desperately from the sudden violence of a single person, but as a stranger, wrongly accused and set upon by a huge, howling mob.
Or perhaps that is only how I wish to see it, a single victim, but a world of blame.
Luke placed the glass on the small wooden table beside his chair, pulled his old briar pipe from his shirt pocket and began to fill it with tobacco. “You remember the first time we saw her, Ben?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said. I knew he meant the time in the park, the time he’d seen Kelli for the first time. But I had seen her long before that, as a little girl, when she’d come into my father’s grocery with her mother.
“I’m Miss Troy” were the first words Kelli’s mother said to my father. She was a tall, slender woman with pale skin, light brown hair and an air of nervous distraction about her, as if she were continually trying to recall where she’d mislaid her keys. She flopped her shiny black purse onto the counter as she spoke, and it lay there like a dead bird between herself and my father. Overhead an old ceiling fan whirled slowly in the summer heat, and I remember that its breeze gently rustled through her hair.
“I’m Miss Troy,” she said, emphasizing the “Miss,” though without explanation, even after she’d added, “And this is my daughter, Kelli.”
It was the summer of 1952, long before much had really changed in the South, and a woman with a young daughter and no husband was not a common sight in a town like ours, where the Confederate battle flag still waved above the courthouse lawn, and the older ways of life it represented, a strict moral and social code, personal reticence, a world order that was essentially Victorian, still held sway. Miss Troy had clearly broken with that world, not only in having borne a child without a husband, but in declaring it so bluntly.
“Nice to meet you, ma’am” was all my father said. Then he smiled that quiet, knowing smile of his, the one that seemed to accept life on its own terms rather than as something that had somehow broken its promise to him. “And what can I do for you, Miss Troy?” he added.
“I’d like to buy a few things,” Miss Troy answered. “I’d like to put the bill on my mother’s account.” She said it almost sharply, her eyes still fixed on my father’s face, as if expecting him to turn her down. “My mother’s not well and I’m down here to see after her for a while.”
My father nodded, then glanced down at Kelli. “Mighty pretty little girl you got there,” he said gently. “How old is she?”
“Six,” Miss Troy answered matter-of-factly.
My father pointed to me. “This is my son. Name’s Ben. He’s the same age as your little girl.”
“Thelma Troy, that’s my mother,” Miss Troy said briskly. “She says you know her.”
“Yes, ma’am, I do.”
“Do you need to see some identification for me to put things on her account?”
The question seemed to surprise my father. “Identification? What for?”
“So you’ll know I’m really her daughter.”
My father looked at her curiously, in wonder at such cold formality. “No, ma’am, I don’t need to see any identification.”
Miss Troy gave him a doubtful glance. “So I can go ahead and do my shopping now? You don’t need to check anything?”
My father shook his head. “I’m sure you’re who you say you are, Miss Troy.”
“Well, thank you, then,” Miss Troy said, still a little coolly, but with some part of my father’s trust already warming her.
She went directly to her shopping after that, tugging Kelli along with her as she made her way down one of the aisles.
From the front of the store, I watched as the two of them moved among the canned goods and stacks of paper products. From time to time, Kelli would glance back at me, her face half hidden in the black curls of her hair. She was darker than her mother, with nearly black eyes, and she wore a white dress that had small green lines scattered across it so that, at first, I thought she must have been rolling in new-mown grass. But more than anything, I noticed how directly she stared at me, as if she were expecting me to challenge her in some way, demand something she had already determined to refuse.
“Hi,” I said as she passed by.
She did not answer but only continued to watch me closely, her eyes evaluating me with what even then I sensed to be a fierce intelligence.
They left a few minutes later, Miss Troy holding her groceries in one hand and tugging Kelli along with the other, both of them passing quickly through the store’s old screen door, letting it fly back with a loud pop.