Cold Fire

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 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.