Read Online Breakheart Hill by Thomas H. Cook - Free Book Online Page A

toward the line of yellow buses that waited in the school driveway in the afternoon. She took the one that headed toward Collier, a rural community some ten miles from Choctaw, and she always satnear the front, either reading or staring silently out the window. She hadn’t spoken in class very often, and we had never done more than greet each other casually outside it, but that first allure still clung to her, and in any group my eye would single her out, as if in a large tableau she had been painted by a separate hand, one that was stronger and more skilled. In class, I listened to her comments more carefully than I listened to the others, and more carefully responded to them. I held back smiles, not wanting to appear boyish, and compliments, not wanting to fawn upon her. I had entered that early, vaguely calculating stage of secret courtship in which you premeditate and approve every word and gesture, and yet I can’t say that at that early point I was swept away by her. There is a kind of love that penetrates you painlessly, like the tiniest of needles, working its way through you so slowly and secretively that you do not feel it as a sudden sting, but as a steadily intensifying atmosphere.
    So it was with Kelli Troy.
    Still, there are times when I imagine it another way, as a sudden, heaving passion, the two of us in the grips of a love like Catherine and Heathcliff’s, the one I was reading about in
Wuthering Heights
that fall. I have even imagined a destiny that might follow such a passion. In this particular fantasy, there is a moment of mad love, and after that, Kelli and I flee Choctaw on a train, the two of us huddled in a boxcar, clutching each other, laughing wildly as the lights grow small and the valley broadens hour after hour until it finally opens up and fans out like a great bay, and it is dawn, and we are young, and nothing real ever touches us again.
    Or this less improbable rendering: A letter comes. It is from the medical school of a great university in Boston or New York. There is a place for me. There is money for me. I show it to Kelli, then take her naked shoulders in my hands. I say, “Come with me.” She draws herselfmore tightly into my arms and presses her face against my chest, and I know that her answer is yes.
    At other times, the same hands reach out for the same bare shoulders, but she does not face me. Instead, she is running up the steep slope that leads to the mountain road, running like they ran, the ones she later told me about, the ones who gave their name to Breakheart Hill.
    For what really happened never truly leaves me, no matter how often my imagination insists upon rewriting it. I hear the blow that echoed through the trees, see her fall to the ground, then rise and begin to stagger up the killing slope, arms reaching for her as she lunges through the undergrowth. I hear her moan as she sinks, exhausted, to the ground, then the sound of footsteps as they close in upon her from the crest of Breakheart Hill, and finally her last words, spoken as the final glimmer of her consciousness flickered out. And after that each life returns to me, each life that was destroyed in the deep woods that day, their faces circling in my mind, one behind the other, like heads on a potter’s wheel.

    A FEW YEARS AGO L UKE SUDDENLY TURNED TO ME . “W HERE do you think it all started, Ben?” he asked. We had just finished putting away the grill after a Sunday cookout with our families, and I had no idea what he was referring to.
    “What started?” I asked.
    “Whatever it was that led to Breakheart Hill.”
    I stared at him silently, unable to speak, surprised at how abruptly he had brought it up again, how tenaciously he had refused to let it go, as if that first doubt, the one I’d glimpsed so long ago, had opened a hole within him that nothing since had filled.
    Luke shifted, motioning me toward two lawn chairs at the far side of the yard. “I think about it sometimes,”he said as we