It was late spring when she said those words, and much of the approaching summer’s later radiance already colored the mountainside. She had raised the window of the classroom, and I remember that it had groaned a bit before it opened, as if trying to hold on to the sense of stopped time that had hung over us during that long, cold winter.
She’d turned back toward us when the job was done, slapped her hands together with a smile and announced, “Well, spring has now officially arrived at Choctaw High.” A few of the students had smiled back at her, and seeing the looks of anticipation on their faces, she’d added, “So as far as the school year is concerned, now we are moving toward the end.”
Moving toward it, yes, but we had not reached it yet, as many of our teachers made clear that same day. Mr. Arlington sternly reminded us that we all had to complete a research paper before the end of the term. Other teachers pointed out similarly unpleasant realities. As for Miss Carver, she announced that the school play would be Romeo and Juliet, then assigned the last book of the year, Ethan Frome. There was a copy of that book on the shelf in Miss Carver’s room when I visited her for the last time. Her own doctor was on vacation, and so the hired companion who lived with her called me in his place. “I heard she taught you when you were at Choctaw High,” she said in explanation when I appeared at the door.
I nodded, and the woman led me through the corridor to the back bedroom, where Miss Carver lay in her bed. Her hair was long and white, but very thin, so that I could see the pink flesh of her scalp as I leaned over to check her pulse.
“She had a rough spell last night,” the woman told me. “I was afraid she’d come down with another stroke.”
“Has she been sleeping long?” I asked.
“About three hours, I’d say,” the woman answered. “She raved a little last night, too. Crazy talk, like she does sometimes.”
I nodded and prepared to take her blood pressure.
The woman shook her head. “Poor old thing,” she said. “Don’t hardly nobody come to see her.”
It was then that I remembered Miss Carver as she’d appeared on that spring day in 1962, smiling to a group of students she’d finally won over, breathing in the fresh warm air, mentioning the school play to Kelli as she’d headed out the door at the end of class, You’d be just right for Juliet.
They had become rather close by then, and years later, as I kneeled at Miss Carver’s bedside, it struck me that Kelli would have visited her often during her long illness, would have relieved her loneliness, made a soup and fed it to her slowly, read to her in the evening from some tale of doomed love, and thereby brightened days she did not live to brighten. And thinking that, it also struck me that some people are not merely brief points of life, but textures within life itself, and that when we take such a person from us, we take not just him or her, but some small piece of everyone they knew or might have known. And I know that years ago if I had been able to sense just that one fragile truth, grasp that single sliver of redeeming light from the smoky darkness that was gathering around me, Kelli would still be with us now.
BUT I COULD NOT GRASP ANYTHING BUT MY OWN CORROSIVE pain, and so, as the days passed, I grew increasingly remote, even sullen. Kelli noticed it, of course, and she made gentle attempts to find out what was wrong. My answer was always the same, a quick shrug, followed by “I’m okay.”
But I was not okay. I was in romantic agony. Every thought of Kelli simultaneously inflamed and chilled me. I could not sit in the same classroom with her without being overwhelmed by the most terrible sense of worthlessness. I thought of her constantly, and was constantly in pain. At times, when we worked together in the basement, I could feel the air thickening around me, dense and suffocating. It was an agitation that electrified every sight of her, lent a charge to every sound she made. Everything was either utterly barren or inexpressibly piercing. I could not stand her voice, or even the sight of her in the hallway, and yet, at the same time, I yearned for every glimpse of her. In her presence, and particularly when I drove her home each afternoon, I felt as if I were bleeding from every pore, and there were moments, when she would glance toward me and smile quietly, as if urging me to tell her what was wrong, when I wanted to pull the car over to the side of the road and set out across the open field, reeling and bellowing like a stricken animal. It was beyond description, beyond consolation, beyond hope.
It was also in almost perfect contrast to the way Kelli lived during what Luke has forever insisted upon calling her “last days.” For as I became increasingly more sullen and enclosed, biting down on my pain, she became livelier, more self-assured and expansive, casting off the last vestiges of her “new girl” status. She talked eagerly to whatever student approached her, became more aggressive in her classroom comments and even kidded the small knot of “tough guys” who smoked in the parking lot after school. She wrote the story of Breakheart Hill and Mr. Arlington reluctantly told her that it was good enough to meet his research paper assignment. She also wrote two new poems, both of them somewhat less ominous than those she’d previously written, less guarded and unsure. “She was blooming,” Luke said to me years later, “like the spring.”
I can remember very well when he said it. We were driving home from Miss Troy’s funeral, its somberness still reflected in Luke’s eyes.
“One thing has always bothered me,” he said. “Kelli didn’t have a thing with her when she got out of my truck that day.”
I nodded, but said nothing.
“You know how she always had something with her,” Luke added. “A book, I mean. Always.”
“Yes.”
“But not that time, Ben,” Luke said. “And that’s always made me think that Kelli had something in mind when she went up there that day.”
As he spoke I saw the black wheels of the car as they ground up the old mining road, snapping vines and crushing twigs and blowing leaves behind them until they finally came to a dusty halt at the base of Breakheart Hill.
“But why would she have gone up there?” Luke asked.
I saw the car door swing open, two feet lower themselves onto the dusty rut, pause a moment, then move forward determinedly, step by anguished step.
“Of course, Sheriff Stone always thought that she’d gone up there to meet somebody,” Luke added. “Somebody who had a reason to hurt her, I guess.”
The feet disappeared into the green, but I could still hear them rustling through the thick undergrowth, moving more slowly now as they mounted the upper slope of Breakheart Hill.
“Who did he think that might be, Luke?” I asked coolly.
Luke’s eyes drifted away from my even stare.
“Who, Luke?” I repeated, this time more insistently. “Did he say who he thought it was she was going to meet that afternoon?”
Still Luke did not turn toward me, and for a single chilling instant I believed that he was actually going to spin around suddenly and say it to my face, You, Ben. He thought she was going to meet you.
But he didn’t do that. Instead, his eyes drifted back to me slowly, almost reluctantly. “I don’t know,” he said. He shook his head, as if trying to drive the mystery from it. “She was blooming, like the spring,” he added. “You could see it in her eyes.”
Her eyes appeared to me instantly, and I saw the same luminous energy that Luke had spoken of so clearly that for a moment I found myself unable to imagine them in any other way, and certainly not lightless and uncomprehending, floating without direction, vacant and disengaged, as they had been when they’d looked up at me for the last time.