“What right had I? What right? The right of one who has a moral purpose, who has always done the right thing and who, by my nature, always and forever must do the right thing, no matter how terrible it might be.” His wrenched and wretched face, his Rumpelstiltskin rage, seemed to belie his claim to superior virtue. “I didn’t know he was intending to murder her, because he didn’t much interest me, not when I had you to fascinate me, your pure love of everyone, your deep reverence for all creatures, your innocence, so different from others of your kind. I knew he killed Emelia only when I heard her psychic death cry as cold water filled her lungs. That cry, silent to every ear but mine, pierced my brain like a quarrel fired by a crossbow. When I reached out for your father, he was filled with terror at the risk he’d taken but also with a savage glee, with pride that he had been so bold, with the hatred of one who blames others for his failures.”
Once when she was eight, on the carnival midway at a county fair, Joanna badgered her mother to take her into the funhouse. The exit was by way of a giant padded barrel that both rolled and slowly pitched; she hadn’t maintained her balance, but had tumbled through it, laughing, and down a rubber ramp. A similar disorientation and dislocation overcame her now, but this time the sensation wasn’t an occasion for laughter. This loss of balance wasn’t physical but emotional, wasn’t for a minute or two but perhaps for a lifetime.
She was only an arm’s length from this new and hostile Jimmy, too close. She wanted to back away, but she feared that her retreat might inflame him further. She stood her ground as she said, “What do you mean you ‘reached out’ for my father? Are you saying . . . you read his mind? You can read minds?”
“Didn’t you hear me when I said you’ve lost your innocence? Didn’t you hear me when I said you’re filled with confusion, strange convictions, fears, and calculation? Didn’t you listen when I said I knew his heart, his mind, as I knew yours back in the day, as I know yours even now?”
She should have foreseen that this was a logical extension of his ability to control animals, but if she had suspected as much on a subconscious level, she had, in fear, always retreated from the conscious consideration of it.
Now a grievous thought occurred to her. She was loath to press him about it, but she could not restrain herself. “If it’s true that my father killed her and if you knew he’d done it, why didn’t you compel him to confess to the police?”
“Compel?” His laugh was without humor and as terrible as a snarl. “Yes, wouldn’t that be a neat solution to human crime and deceit, if I could simply compel every miscreant to tell the truth and do the right thing. Had I such power, I would use it ruthlessly, Jojo.” He spoke her name without affection, in fact with a note of mockery. “If I want to know a person’s mind and if I focus on him to the exclusion of all else, no secret can be kept from me, but I have no control of him.”
“The animals . . .”
“They’re simple entities. Human beings are orders of magnitude more intelligent than the smartest animals. Elk I may control, rats and rabbits, whole herds at a time, but I may not control a man, woman, or child.”
“May not . . . but you can?”
“I can. But I am forbidden.”
“By whom?”
“By my very nature.”
“So you used the bear to murder him.”
“To execute a murderer.”
“And were you . . . ?” She didn’t complete the question, but left it unspoken, as a test of the power that he claimed to possess.
“No,” he said, answering what she hadn’t asked. “I wasn’t in control of the bear when it attacked him, when it devoured him alive.”
If long ago she had thought him magical, she now found him mysterious, unfathomable, alien.
Beyond these walls, the windmill rotor clicked-clicked-clicked, and through its spinning vanes, the rising wind sang a threnody for the slowly dying light of late afternoon.
She hoped to hear the Studebaker pickup returning, but she couldn’t will the sound into existence.
Jimmy Two Eyes pointed a finger at her, and his ragged voice became a lash of censure. “Because you’ve changed, you’ve changed tragically, because you’ve lost your innocence, you fear me now, as much as you once loved me. In the past, I was like a gnome to you—all Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen. Now you look at me and see a monster, you think I’m capable of monstrous things, like inhabiting the bear while it ate your father, relishing the blood and violence.”