Kelli nodded slowly. “Giving it back to him,” she said.
I glanced down the hill and felt a terrible sense of outrage at what had happened there, at the cruel genius that had conceived it, the crowds who’d watched it, the contradictory atmospheres of both festival and suffering that must have washed over it on those distant summer days. A great sense of purpose suddenly seized me, naive, no doubt, but absolutely genuine, a need to right this ancient wrong, to redress its still abiding grievance, to take Choctaw into the future. I thought of the old Negro cemetery again, bleak in its poverty and abandonment, and of the freezing line of demonstrators who’d seemed so pitiable to me that night in Gadsden but who now seemed part of a great renewal, fierce and united, a transforming power. And in that instant, brief as it turned out to be, I think I probed the outer wall of that moral greatness that Kelli had spoken of months before, became, for the first time in my life, larger than I appeared to be. “We’ll tell the whole story in the Wildcat,” I said resolutely. “We’ll let everybody in Choctaw know what happened here.”
Kelli walked over to the crest of the hill and stood facing out over the valley.
I started to say more, but the stillness in her face stopped me.
She continued to look out over the crest of the hill for a few seconds longer, then turned to face me. I knew that she would never in her life be more beautiful than she was at that moment, that her hair would never be more luxuriously tangled, her skin more darkly radiant, the moral gravity in her eyes more deep and thrilling.
She’d left the camera on a stone not far away, and impulsively I leaned over and picked it up.
“Do you want to take some pictures?” I asked.
She shook her head mutely.
“I’d like to take just one,” I insisted. “Do you mind?”
“No,” she said, then waited while I brought the camera to my eye, focused carefully and snapped the picture that I last saw in Sheriff Stone’s enormous hand.
WE LINGERED ON THE HILL AFTER I TOOK KELLI’S PICTURE. Kelli’s mood continued to be quite somber. She talked quietly about how she intended to write her article for the last issue of the paper, what she hoped to accomplish by it. She talked, too, about Lyle Gates, and even apologized for the way she’d acted at Cuffy’s. “I should have just talked to him,” she told me, “but when he started talking about ‘niggers,’ I guess it just sent me over the edge.”
“Forget about what happened with Lyle,” I told her, although, of course, that was the last thing I wanted her to forget about, since it had unexpectedly afforded me a cherished opportunity to play the hero, one I wanted her to remember forever.
Toward four in the afternoon, it began to grow somewhat chilly, and we decided to leave the hill.
“Do you have to go home now?” I asked as we drove back down toward Choctaw, “or could we go to my house and maybe sit on the porch for a while?”
Kelli smiled. “No, I don’t have to go home right now.”
And so we went to my house instead. I fixed us a couple of sandwiches, and we ate them in the kitchen, then walked out onto the front porch and sat down in the swing.
Kelli wore her sweater out onto the porch, though only draped lightly over her shoulders, like a cape.
“It’s nice out here,” she said as she leaned back. “Do you sit out here a lot?”
“In the summer, I do.”
“With your father?”
“Mostly by myself.”
She lifted her hand to brush back a stray curl, and her ring glinted slightly in the porch light.
“That’s pretty,” I told her.
“It was my grandfather’s,” Kelli told me.
I smiled. “A family heirloom.”
“When my grandmother gave it to me, she said I should keep it until I had ‘given myself’ to someone.” She laughed at the quaintness of her grandmother’s expression. “I guess she meant my husband.” She shrugged. “So I guess that’s what I’ll do.”
“Why didn’t she give it to your mother?” I asked.
The question seemed to darken Kelli’s mood. “I guess she thought my mother wouldn’t need it. Of course, I’m not sure I’ll ever need it either,” she added with a light chuckle.
“Sure you will, Kelli,” I told her.
“Maybe so,” Kelli murmured. She shivered slightly and turned away again. When she looked back toward me, I could tell that the chill had begun to get to her.
“When you’re cold, your lips turn purple,” I said. Then I reached up and moved to touch them with one extended finger.
Her response was a subtle gesture, hardly noticeable except to me. And yet, it was precisely in response to me that she made it. It was a quick flinching away from my slightest touch, and I immediately recognized it for exactly what it was, an absolute physical withdrawal from me, a rejection so spontaneous and complete that I hastily pulled back my hand and sunk it into my lap.
Kelli seemed hardly to have noticed what she’d done, but I saw it again and again as we sat together for the next few minutes, she talking on about this and that, I sinking into an inconceivable blackness. I had never in my life reached out toward her or anyone else in that way. To be so totally rebuffed in so hesitant an approach filled me with an inexpressible sense of self-loathing. I looked at my hands, and hated their short, pudgy fingers. I hated my glasses and the washed-out brown of my hair. I loathed the line of freckles on my arms, and the murky green-gray color of my eyes. I hated every smell and tone and texture of my body. In everything, I felt ugly and unworthy and inconceivably repulsive, a grotesque little frog that no kiss could ever transform into a prince.
Sitting beside me, Kelli saw not a glimmer of all this. She had pulled away slightly from a finger she did not want to touch her lips. She had done it reflexively and inoffensively, in the middle of a sentence that she continued without a break, her voice pouring over me as I drew my hand away and sunk back into the swing, sitting there in silence while she went on about something I have long since forgotten.
She talked for quite a while that night, and I must have seemed a very good listener, though I was no longer listening at all. I heard her voice only as a murmur in the background, saw her face only in the hazy blur of something infinitely distant. For in a sense, she was no longer a young girl in herself, but only the aching symbol of my own devastating inadequacy.
And yet, despite all these tumultuous feelings, I managed to hold myself in check that night. Using every ounce of will, I chatted on with her while we sat together in the swing, then drove her home and waited for her to disappear into the house. But unlike other nights, I did not linger in the driveway in hope of getting a last glance at her figure as it moved past a lighted window. To have done so would have been to hold on to something that I knew had escaped me. And so I left as fast as I could, driving through the surrounding darkness, emptily recalling the movements of a love that now seemed as lost as I was. I felt gutted, my insides scooped out and thrown aside, and later that night, in a strange, forbidding dream, I saw Kelli hovering over me in the airless darkness of my room, her eyes pupilless and unlighted, her hair a dark tangle of vine and forest bramble, an object of romantic dream that had become romantic nightmare.
CHAPTER 16
SOMETIMES IT COMES BACK TO ME ON WORDS THAT ARE themselves ominous: Did you hear what happened to Lyle Gates? But at other times they are ordinary, inconsequential words, and said outside the context of my later memory, they would hold no portent at all, as when I suddenly hear Miss Carver’s voice rising out of nowhere: Now we are moving toward the end.