Holly put a hand on his arm. “Wait.”
He tore loose of her, almost shoved her away. He glared at her and
said, “I want to get out of here.”
Undeterred, she grabbed and halted him again. “Jim, where is your
grandfather? Where is he buried?”
Jim pointed to the plot beside his grandmother’s. “He’s there, of
course, with her.”
Then he saw the left half of the granite monument. He had been so
intently focused on the right half, on the impossible date of his
grandmother’s death, that he had not noticed what was missing from the
left side. His grandfather’s name was there, as it should be, engraved
at the same time that Lena’s had been: HENRY JAMES IRONHEART. And the
date Of his birth. But that was all. The date of his death had never
been chiseled into the stone.
The iron sky was pressing lower.
The trees seemed to be leaning closer, arching over him.
Holly said, “Didn’t you say he died eight months after Lena?”
His mouth was dry. He could hardly work up enough spit to speak, and
the words came out in dry whispers like susurrant bursts of sand blown
against desert stone. “What the hell do you want from me? I told you.
. .
eight months. . . May twenty-fourth of the next year. . . .”
“How did he die?”
“I. . . I don’t. . . I don’t remember.”
“Illness?”
Shut up, shut up! “I don’t know.”
“An accident?”
“I. . . just. . . I think. . . I think it was a stroke.”
Large parts of the past were mists within a mist. He realized now that
he rarely thought about the past. He lived totally in the present.
He had never realized there were huge holes in his memories simply
because there were so many things he had never before tried to remember.
“Weren’t you your grandfather’s nearest relative?” Holly asked.
“Yes.”
“Didn’t you attend to the details of his funeral?”
He hesitated, frowning. “I think. . . yes. . .”
“Then did you just forget to have the date of his death added to the
headstone?”
He stared at the blank spot in the granite, frantically searching an
equally blank spot in his memory, unable to answer her. He felt sick.
He wanted to curl up and close his eyes and sleep and never wake up, let
something else wake up in his place. . . .
She said, “Or did you bury him somewhere else?”
Across the ashes of the burnt-out sky, the shrieking blackbirds swooped
again, slashing calligraphic messages with their wings, their meaning no
more decipherable than the elusive memories darting through the deeper
grayness of Jim’s mind.
Holly drove them around the corner to Tivoli Gardens.
When they had left the pharmacy, Jim had wanted to drive to the
cemetery, worried about what he would find there but at the same time
eager to confront his misremembered past and wrench his recollections
into line with the truth. The experience at the grave site had shaken
him, however, and now he was no longer in a rush to find out what
additional surprise awaited him. He was content to let Holly drive, and
she suspected that he would be happier if she just drove out of town,
turned south, and never spoke to him of New Svenborg again.
The park was too small to have a service road. They left the car at the
street and walked in.
Holly decided that Tivoli Gardens was even less inviting close up than
it had been when glimpsed from a moving car yesterday. The dreary
impression it made could not be blamed solely on the overcast sky. The
grass was half parched from weeks of summer sun, which could be quite
intense in any central California valley. Leggy runners had sprouted
unchecked from the rose bushes; the few remaining blooms were faded and
dropping petals in the thorny sprawl. The other flowers looked wilted,
and the two benches needed painting.
Only the windmill was well maintained. It was a bigger, more imposing
mill than the one at the farm, twenty feet higher, with an encircling
deck about a third of the way up.