were widening.
“-you were with them” He stopped denying, and a terrible expression
stained his face.
“-it was called the Dixie Duck,” she said.
When the memory exploded back to him with pile-driver force, he hunched
forward on the bench as if he might vomit, but he did not. He curled
his hands into fists on his knees, and his face tightened into a clench
er- of pain, and he made small inarticulate sounds that were beyond
grief and horror.
and She put an arm around his bent shoulders.
his Henry Ironheart looked at her and said, “Oh, my God,” as he began to
realize the extremity of denial to which his grandson had been driven.
mad “Oh, my God.” As Jim’s strangled gasps of pain changed into quiet
sobs, few Henry Ironheart looked at the flowers again, then at his aged
hands, then away, at his feet on the tilted braces of the wheelchair,
everywhere he could think away to look to avoid Jim and Holly, but at
last he met Holly’s eyes again. “He had therapy,” he said, trying hard
to expiate his guilt. “We knew he might need therapy. We took him to a
psychiatrist in Santa Barbara. Took him i the there several times. We
did what we could. But the psychiatrist-Hemp hill, his name was-he said
Jim was all right, he said there was no reason to bring him any more,
just after six visits, he said Jim was all right.”
Holly said, “What do they ever know? What could Hemphill have done when
he didn’t really know the boy, didn’t love him?”
you Henry Ironheart flinched as if she had struck him, though she had
not meant her comment to be a condemnation of him.
“No,” she said quickly, hoping he would believe her, “what I meant was,
there’s no mystery why I’ve gotten farther than Hemphill ever could.
is of It’s just because I love him. It’s the only thing that ever leads
to healing.”
ave a Stroking Jim’s hair, she said, “You couldn’t have saved them,
baby. You didn’t have the power then, not like you have it now.
You were lucky to ward get out alive. Believe me, honey, listen and
believe me.”
last. For a moment they sat unspeaking, all of them in pain.
Jim Holly noticed more blackbirds had gathered in the sky. Maybe a
dozen cess- of them now. She didn’t know how Jim was drawing them
there-or why -but she knew that he was, and regarded them with growing
dread.
She put a hand over one of Jim’s hands, encouraging him to relax it.
Though he slowly stopped crying, he kept his fist as tight as a fist of
sculpted stone.
To Henry, she said, “Now. This is your chance. Explain why you turned
away from him, why you did. . . whatever you did to him.”
Clearing his throat, wiping nervously at his mouth with his weak right
hand, Henry spoke at first without looking at either of them.
“Well. . .
you have to know. . . how it was. A few months after he came back from
Atlanta, there was this film company in town, shooting a movie-” “The
Black Windmill,” Holly said.
“Yeah. He was reading all the time. . . .” Henry stopped, closed his ,
he eyes as if to gather strength. When he opened them, he stared at
Jim’s of. He bowed head and seemed prepared to meet his eyes if he
looked up. “You clench was reading all the time, going through the
library shelf by shelf, and because of the film you read the Willott
book. For a while it became. . .
hell, I don’t know. . . I guess maybe you’d have to say it was an
obsession with you, Jim. It was the only thing that brought you out of
your shell, talking about that book, so we encouraged you to go watch
them shoot the picture. Remember? After a while, you started telling
us an alien was in our pond and windmill, just like in the book and
movie.
At first we thought you was just play-acting.”
He paused.
The silence lengthened.
About twenty birds in the sky above.