Henry paused for the first time in a while and swallowed hard. He had
not looked at Holly once throughout his account of that stormy night,
only at Jim’s bowed head. With less of a slur in his voice, as if it
were vitally important to him to tell the rest of it as clearly as he
could, he said: “I went up the steps and found you in the high room,
Jimmy. Do you remember that? Sitting by the candle, holding the book
in your hands so tight it couldn’t be taken from you till hours later.
You wouldn’t speak.”
The old man’s voice quavered now. “God forgive me, but all I could
think about was Lena being dead, my dear Lena gone, and you being such a
strange child all year, and still strange even at that moment, with your
book, refusing to talk to me. I guess. . . I guess I went a little mad
right then, for a while. I thought you might’ve pushed her, Jimmy. I
thought you might’ve been in one of your. . . upsets. . . and maybe you
pushed her.”
As if it had become too much for him to address himself to his grandson
any longer, Henry shifted his gaze to Holly. “That year after Atlanta,
he’d been a strange boy. . . almost like a boy we didn’t know. He was
quiet, like I said, but there was rage in him, too, a fury like no child
should ever have. It sometimes scared us. The only time he ever showed
it was in his sleep. . . dreaming. . . we’d hear him screeching, and
we’d go down the hall to his room. . . and he’d be kicking and punching
at the mattress, the pillows, clawing at the sheets, furious, taking it
all out on something in his dreams, and we’d have to wake him.”
Henry paused and looked away from Holly, down at his bent right hand,
which lay half useless in his lap. Jim’s fist, under Holly’s hand,
remained vise-tight.
“You never struck out at Lena or me, Jimmy, you was a good boy, never
gave us that kind of trouble. But in the mill that night, I grabbed you
and shook you, Jimmy, tried to make you admit how you’d pushed her down
the stairs. There was no excuse for what I did, how I behaved. . .
except I was grief crazy over Jamie and Cara, and now over Lena,
everyone dying around me, and there was only you, and you were so
strange, so strange and locked up in yourself that you scared me, so I
turned on you when I should have been taking you in my arms.
Turned on you that night. . .
and didn’t realize what I’d done until a lot of years later. . .
too late.”
The birds were in a tighter circle now. Directly overhead.
“Don’t,” she said softly to Jim. “Please don’t.”
Until Jim responded, Holly could not know if these revelations were for
better or worse. If he had blamed himself for his grandma’s death
merely because Henry had instilled the guilt in him, then he would get
past this. If he blamed himself because Lena had come into the high
room, had seen The Enemy materializing from the wall, and had stumbled
backward down the stairs in terror, he might still overcome the past.
But if The Enemy had torn itself free of the wall and pushed her. . .
“I treated you like a murderer for the next six years, until you went
away to school,” Henry said. “When you was gone. . . well, in time, I
started to think about it with a clearer head, and I knew what I’d done.
You’d had nowhere to turn for comfort. Your mom and dad were gone, your
grandma. You went into town to get books, but you couldn’t join in with
other kids because that little Zacca bastard, Ned Zacca, he was twice
your size and wouldn’t ever let you alone. You had no peace except in
books. I tried to call you, but you wouldn’t take the calls. I wrote
but I think you never read the letters.”