too. Or seemed to. He never did one of his tricks again, and after a
lot of years it was sometimes hard to believe he’d ever done those
strange things when he was little.”
In spite of his good spirits, Henry Ironheart had looked every one of
his eighty years. Now he appeared to be far older, ancient.
He said, “Jimmy was so strange after Atlanta, so unreachable and full of
rage. . . sometimes it was possible to love him and still be a little
afraid of him. Later, God forgive me, I suspected him of. ”
“I know,” Holly said.
His slack features tightened, and he looked sharply at her.
Your wife, she said. “Lena. The way she died.”
More thickly than usual, he said, “You know so much.”
“Too much,” she said. “Which is funny. Because all my life I’ve known
too little.”
Henry looked down at his culpable hands again. “How could I believe
that a boy of ten, even a disturbed boy, could’ve shoved her down the
mill stairs when he loved her so much? Too many years Later, I saw that
I’d been so damned cruel to him, so unfeeling, so damned stupid. By
then, he wouldn’t give me the chance to apologize for what I’d done. .
what I’d thought. After he left for college, he never came back. Not
once in more than thirteen years, until I had my stroke.”
He came back once, Holly thought, nineteen years after Lena’s death, to
face up to it and put flowers on her grave.
Henry said, “If there was some way I could explain to him, if he’d ust
give me one chance. . ”
“He’s here now,” Holly said, getting up again.
The weight of fear that pulled on the old man’s face made him appear
even more gaunt than he had been. “Here?”
“He’s come to give you that chance,” was all that Holly could say.
“Do you want me to take you to him?”
The blackbirds were flocking. Eight of them had gathered now in the sky
above, circling.
Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary Over many a
quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore While I nodded, nearly
napping, suddenly there came a tapping, As of some one gently rapping,
rapping at my chamber door To the real birds above, Jim whispered,”
Quoth the Raven, Never more.” He heard a soft rhythmic creaking, as of a
wheel going around and around, and footsteps. When he looked up, he saw
Holly pushing his wheelchair-bound grandfather along the walkway toward
the bench.
Eighteen years had passed since he had gone away to school, and he had
seen Henry only once before in all this time. Initially, there had been
a few telephone calls, but soon Jim stopped making those and,
eventually, stopped accepting them as well. When letters came, he threw
them away unopened. He remembered all of that now-and he was beginning
to remember why.
He began to rise. His legs would not support him. He remained on the
bench.
Holly parked the wheelchair facing Jim, then sat beside him. “How you
doing?”
Nodding dumbly, he glanced up at the birds circling against the ashen
clouds, rather than face his grandfather.
The old man could not look at Jim, either. He studied the beds of
flowers intently, as if he had been in a great rush to get outside and
have a look at those blooms and nothing else.
Holly knew this was not going to be easy. She was sympathetic toward
each of the men and wanted to do her best to bring them together at
last.
First, she had to burn away the tangled weeds of one last lie that Jim
had told her and that, consciously if not subconsciously, he had
successfully told himself “There was no traffic accident, honey,” she
said, putting a hand on his knee. “That isn’t how it happened.”
Jim lowered his eyes from the blackbirds and regarded her with nervous
expectation. She could see that he longed to know the truth and dreaded
hearing it.
“It happened in a restaurant” Jim slowly shook his head in denial.
“-down in Atlanta, Georgia-” He was still shaking his head, but his eyes