Breakheart Hill by Thomas H. Cook
And so there was something darkly suggestive in the way he posed the question that afternoon, the words coming slowly, heavily, as if hung with weights. Did you hear what happened to Lyle Gates?
I shook my head almost casually, revealing no hint of the pang I suddenly felt at the mention of his name. “No, I haven’t heard anything about Lyle,” I answered.
It was late on a fall afternoon, and Luke had dropped by my office as he often did, though on this occasion he had no doubt been urged there by what he’d just learned. “Well, you knew he’d been brought to the prison farm, didn’t you?” he asked.
Two years before, the local paper had noted that after twenty years in the state penitentiary, Lyle had been moved to a prison farm near Choctaw to serve the rest of his sentence. His mother was ailing, the article said, and she had petitioned the Board of Prisons to have Lyle moved closer to her so that she could continue to visit him without having to endure the hardship of a long journey. The board had granted Mrs. Gates’s petition, and Lyle had subsequently been transferred to a prison farm in the northern part of the county. I had neither heard nor read anything about him since that time. So that Luke’s question, when it came, struck me with the suddenness of a gust of wind.
“Yes, I knew he was at the prison farm. But that’s the last I’ve heard about him.”
“Well, they killed him yesterday, Ben,” Luke said.
I felt my lips part in a stunned whisper, but no sound emerged.
Luke sat in the chair in front of my desk, his eyes trained on mine. “Killed him,” he repeated. “Shot him down.”
“Who?”
“Well, to tell you the truth, from the way it sounds, he sort of killed himself.”
I stood up, walked to the window and looked out. To the right, I could see the old courthouse standing in its grave severity atop a flight of cement stairs. I remembered how I’d stood on those stairs years before, stood in the driving rain with my father next to me, the two of us watching as Lyle passed by, so very small, as he had seemed, against the enormous gray monolith of Sheriff Stone.
“Suicide, that’s what I’d call it,” Luke went on. “I mean, he didn’t give the guards much choice.” He drew the newspaper from beneath his arm and dropped it on my desk. “It’s all in there,” he said. “You can read it when you get a chance.”
I nodded, my eyes still locked on the old courthouse, the sternly accusing look of its high stone walls.
“You know, Ben,” Luke said, “I never could figure out why Lyle would do something like that.”
I heard Mr. Bailey’s voice echoing through the years: Only hate can do a thing like this.
“I know what they said it was,” Luke said. “That Lyle wanted to get back at Kelli for treating him the way she had that day at Cuffy’s. But that was weeks before, Ben. That was old business as far as Lyle was concerned.”
I offered nothing, said nothing.
“Of course it could have been that he was all fired up by that stuff Kelli wrote in the Wildcat,” Luke said. He fell silent, and I knew that he was reconsidering it all again, going through the old details, chewing on the questions that still plagued him. “But to attack a young girl the way he did? I don’t know, Ben. Lyle never seemed mean enough for something like that. I mean, the way Kelli treated him at Cuffy’s, that would have made him mad, but not that mad.”
I kept my eyes on the far mountain, its shadowy ridges growing darker as night fell. In my mind I saw Lyle stalking through the dense green undergrowth, his eyes searching for the girl he’d seen in Luke’s truck, the one who’d insulted him in full view of the men he worked with on the road, an affront whose depth, as I believed at the time, even he could not have imagined as he’d stood, thunderstruck, in Cuffy’s Grill that day.
“I guess there’ll always be a few things in life we’ll never know,” Luke said.
I returned to my chair and eased myself into it. “I guess so,” I told him softly, wearily, as if all the years had fallen upon me, depositing in one great load their full, enormous weight.
He looked at me tenderly. “You’ve never gotten over it, have you, Ben?” he asked.
I shook my head. “No.”
“Me neither, in a way,” Luke said. “Probably a few others, too.”
I said nothing, but only let my eyes drift down toward the newspaper, my mind slowly repeating the names of all the others who had never gotten over it: Todd. Mary. Raymond. Sheila and Rosie. Noreen. Perhaps countless others down through time.
Luke shrugged. “Well, got to go. The boys are in from college tonight, so we’re making a big family barbecue.” He stood, walked to the door, then turned back. “You and Noreen want to drop by later, have some ribs?”
“No, thank you.”
“Well, take it easy, then.” He offered a faint smile before he stepped out of my office, carefully closing the door behind him.
I glanced down at the paper, reluctant to read what was in it, afraid of the surging blackness that would overwhelm me.
And so I waited until long after Luke had left my office before I finally leaned forward and spread the paper out across my desk. There was a picture of Lyle near the bottom of the front page. He was dressed in prison clothes, a figure slumped on a metal bed that had been attached to a bare cement wall. The years had added a dreadful puffiness to his face. His hair had darkened, and there were deep lines at his eyes, but more than anything I noticed the puzzlement in his face. He looked like a child asking a teacher to clear up some confusing point in math or science, unable to go on without an answer.
The article beneath the picture was no more than a few paragraphs, and it related exactly what had happened to him.
It had occurred in the middle of the previous afternoon. Lyle had been working with a road crew sent out from the prison farm to cut the tall grasses that grew along the state highway to the north. He’d been digging with a pickax, struggling to uproot a stubborn patch of kudzu, when he’d suddenly stopped, raised the pickax and begun to swing it over his head. The guards had surrounded him quickly, but he’d refused to drop the ax. Instead, he’d swung it ever more wildly, sending bits of grass and clay flying in all directions from its whirring blades before he’d abruptly lunged toward them so quickly that they’d “acted in their own defense,” as the paper put it, and fired upon him.
As I read, I saw all of it as if it were a film unspooling in my mind: Lyle ripping at the thick, resisting vine, the sweat running in grimy streams down his arms and back, darkening what remained of his blond hair. Suddenly his eyes narrow, his teeth clench, his fingers tighten around the handle of the ax, and I know that it has all come back to him in a terrible rush, the harsh words he’d so thoughtlessly spoken at Cuffy’s, Luke’s truck whizzing past him as he’d trudged up the mountain road, Edith Sparks’s accusing finger, the jury’s verdict and then that long walk down the courthouse steps, the rain pelting down upon him like small gray stones.
And I knew that it was while he’d stood helplessly within the swirl of his memory, dazed by a dark kaleidoscope of images, that he must have decided to end it all.
I hear the whir of the blade as it begins to wheel about in the smoldering air, then the pistol shots that stagger him. Small geysers of blood erupt from his chest. His legs collapse beneath him. The left side of his face slams onto the clay beside the road, one green eye staring lifelessly into the summer woods.
I see all of this, and I think, Will this never end?
LYLE WAS BURIED IN THE TOWN CEMETERY THREE DAYS LATER. A scattering of relatives, all looking faintly ashamed, perhaps even resentful of the darkness he’d brought to their family name, gathered at his grave. An old woman sat in a metal chair, and though time and a long illness had greatly changed her, I saw that it was Lyle’s mother.
I did not approach her, but when the funeral was over and I started to leave, I saw her wave her hand, motioning me toward her.
I walked over to where she sat beneath the shade of a huge oa
“You’re Dr. Wade, aren’t you?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“I want you to know that I don’t bear you no ill will for what you said about Lyle in court.”
“I appreciate that, Mrs. Gates,” I told her.
“You just told the truth, that’s all.” She smiled softly. “Everybody says you’re a real good man.”
I nodded. “Thank you, ma’am,” I said calmly, but even as I said it, I could feel myself shrinking and drying up. It was a feeling I’d experienced before. I’d felt it the first time I’d noticed bruises on Raymond Jeffries’s small arms and legs, and then again as I’d lifted Rosie Cameron off the stretcher, a weightless sack of broken bones, and realized that she was dead. I’d felt it yet again some years later as I’d looked back and watched Mary Diehl disappear into the same white room where she sits blankly to this day. And later still, I’d felt it when Luke and I had stumbled upon Todd Jeffries as he lay sprawled across the golf course at Turtle Grove. It was a sense of being wholly withered, bones like twigs gathered beneath a dry, crackling skin, and I was doomed to feel it at least once more.
Mrs. Gates smiled quietly, but I could sense something building in her mind. “I guess I have to accept it that Lyle did what everybody says he did,” she said softly. “But it’s hard for a mother to do.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
She shook her head slowly. “I thought I knowed my son, but to this day I can’t figure out why he would have hurt that girl.”
She paused a moment, perhaps reconsidering it all, trying to picture the little boy she’d raised falling viciously upon a young girl in a deep wood. “I just can’t figure why he’d do a thing like that,” she repeated, and with those words I saw Lyle as he’d moved down the courthouse stairs that last day, one of Sheriff Stone’s enormous hands holding almost tenderly his arm, the rain mercilessly battering down upon him, my father’s words beyond his hearing. There’s something missing in that boy. And I remembered how I’d rushed away at that moment, disappearing into the crowd, disappearing from Choctaw, disappearing for hours until night had finally fallen and my father had gone in search of me, gone to Cuffy’s and Luke’s and finally up the mountain to where he’d found me sitting on the crest of Breakheart Hill, drenched and sobbing, his arms wrapping around me comfortingly in the driving rain, urging me to my feet and then back up toward the road, offering me the only words he could. I know how much you loved her, son, thinking that it was grief and only grief that had sent me rushing from the courthouse steps, and never imagining that it might be more.
But it was not my father’s words that sounded over me now, but Mrs. Gates’s words, ragged with age, but passionate. “Lyle wasn’t a mean boy.” She shook her head slowly. “So I just can’t figure out what could have stirred him up so much against that poor girl.”
I heard my mind pronounce the words I still could not bring myself to say: I can.
CHAPTER 21
BUT I COULD NOT. AND I KNOW NOW THAT I MYSELF MIGHT never have known the whole truth had not Miss Troy dropped by my office one morning. It was several years after Lyle’s death, and by that time many others had joined him in the grave—Todd, for example, along with Mr. Bailey, Miss Carver, my father, and Sheriff Stone.
It was early on an autumn morning. I’d gotten to my office before anyone else, and so I was alone when I heard the door open, then the soft, muffled beat of a cane.
I stepped out of my consulting room, glanced down the short corridor that led to the small waiting area and saw Miss Troy standing erectly as ever, her eyes drifting slowly about the room. She was very old by then, her hair a perfect white, but even in the distance, I could see that her eyes were still clear and sharp.
“Good morning, Miss Troy,” I said.
She turned toward me. A look of relief settled onto her face. “Ah, Ben. So good to see you.”
I nodded and came toward her.
When I reached her, she embraced me. Beneath her fall coat, her body seemed very small.
“Are you feeling all right?” I asked as I stepped out of her arms.
“Oh, yes,” she answered. “I’m fine.”
There was so much I wanted to tell her, but could not. So I said only, “Is there something I can do for you?”
For a moment, she seemed reluctant.
“Anything,” I assured her.
She hesitated a moment longer, then said, “Well, you remember that a few months back, at your father’s funeral, I mentioned that I might have a favor to ask?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Well, this morning I had to come up to the courthouse to put a few things in order, and I just decided to drop by and … and …”
“And what, Miss Troy?”
“And ask if you might be able to come by the house tonight.”
For an instant, I couldn’t answer, and in that brief interval, Miss Troy must have seen something very disturbing invade my face, because she quickly withdrew her request. “I just couldn’t,” I explained. “Even though … I just couldn’t.”
“I’m sorry, Ben. I shouldn’t have asked you to do that. I know how you felt about Kelli. I know that’s why you never came back to the house after what happened.”
I struggled to compose myself, to fight off the suffocating darkness that had flooded in around me and finally, to do the right thing. “No, no,” I said. “I’ll come by.” I drew in a long, determined breath. “Do you need some help, is that it?”
She nodded. “I’m too old to manage sometimes. Things get put off, you know.” She looked at me shyly, ashamed of the admission. “I’m so old now that things get put off.”
I smiled quietly. “Of course they do, Miss Troy.”
“But it’s not right, just to let things go,” she added.
“I understand.”
“I know it’s not your job to help me, Ben. But I was just thinking about the way it was with you and Kelli, and I thought that you would be the one to …”
“I’ll come this evening,” I assured her. “Just tell me what time I should be there.”
She nodded slowly, then took hold of my arm. “Just when your work is over,” she said. “And, Ben, I do appreciate it.” Then she turned and walked unsteadily from my office, her hand tightly gripped on her cane, her once-proud shoulders stooped beneath a burden whose intricate mass she had yet to understand.
I worked on through the rest of that long day, treating patients in my office, then doing rounds at the hospital. Faces came and went, faces that were young and old, black and white, male and female, people suffering from different ailments, enduring different degrees of pain, fear, helplessness. And yet, they all seemed curiously the same to me that day, all of them frightened and confused, lost in clouds of unknowing, asking the same questions in the same baffled and imploring tones: Where did my life go wrong? Why did this happen to me? When will it finally end?
“I DON’T KNOW,” I SAID. “I DON’T KNOW WHEN I’LL BE HOME tonight.”
It was at the end of the day, and on the other end of the telephone line I could feel the tension in Noreen’s voice. “I don’t think you should go out there, Ben,” she said worriedly. “It’s been so long … it’s been …”
“Over thirty years.”
“… since you’ve been there,” Noreen went on, her voice growing steadily more agitated. “You can’t possibly know what—”
“No, I can’t,” I told her, “but Miss Troy is just too old to do things by herself now, Noreen. She can’t manage on her own. Her family’s gone. She’s frail. She can barely walk, even with her cane. She needs help, and I’m the only—”
“But you might have to go more than once, you might have to—”
“I don’t think so,” I said firmly. I could tell that Noreen knew what I meant, but I said it anyway. “Miss Troy knows that she’s near the end, Noreen. That’s why she asked me to help her. Because she knows it will be only this one time.”
I heard her release a quick, resigned breath. “Well, I guess you know what you should do, Ben,” she said dully.
I hung up the phone and lowered myself into the chair behind my desk. The office was empty now, and quiet, with only an autumn wind to break the silence as it pressed softly against the windowpane. Outside it was gray, with thick clouds rolling in from the north. They had been gathering slowly all during the day, and by dusk they had descended over the upper quarter of the mountain, covering it in a smoky haze, so that as I headed for my car that evening, the lower slopes looked bare and burned over, naked, leafless, exposed, all the way from the old mining road up to the crest of Breakheart Hill.
I was halfway to Miss Troy’s when the rain began. It came first in a scattering of drops, then in a heavy falling, and finally in thick, windblown sheets that swept across the hood of the car or drove directly toward the windshield in sudden, angry gusts.
By the time I turned onto the road that led to Miss Troy’s house, small rivulets snaked tiny muddy rapids down the gullies that bordered either side of it and swollen brown puddles dotted the surrounding fields.
The dense cloud cover had brought a premature darkness to the valley, so that I’d finally had to switch on my headlights, their beams at last coming to rest on Miss Troy’s house, illuminating the disrepair into which it had fallen, the unpainted wooden slats and leaning underposts, a set of stairs that bowed down in the middle, its crossbeams splintered and jagged, a yard so ravaged with deep ruts and scattered with debris that even in the nakedness of late fall it looked strangely junglelike, thick, weedy, overgrown.
I turned off the lights, then the motor, and sat in the shadowy interior of my car, the rain pounding down on all sides in a steady and disquieting assault. I started to get out, then heard Kelli’s voice: Are you mad at me? and felt all of it sweep back over me as it must have swept over Lyle the day he died, all of it swirling around me in a single boiling wave of memory, so intense and searing, it seemed to raise red welts across my soul.