What Eli Sees – Chapter 14
“The Forgiveness of Edmund Harwick”
Eli stood in the cold barn with his flashlight and thought about what he knew about Edmund Harwick. Wool mill owner. Church deacon. A man who had hanged himself in December 1863 while his wife and three daughters slept inside the house. A man who had been trapped for a hundred and eleven years in the moment of his worst act, unable to pass on, held not only by the Pale Woman but by the specific gravity of the thing he had done and the specific people he had done it to.
He had left them. Without warning. Without goodbye. They had woken on a December morning and found him in the barn and whatever his reasons — the war, the mill, some despair that had grown too large to carry — his reasons had not been theirs to understand. They had been left with the shape of him missing and the question of why that no one could answer and the stigma of 1863 that made the death a source of shame rather than grief. And Edmund Harwick, bound to the place of his dying, had watched his family carry that for the rest of their lives. Had watched his wife age and die carrying it. Had watched his daughters carry it into their own lives and marriages and pass the shape of it on to their children.
“I can’t give you forgiveness,” Eli said. “That’s not mine to give.”
Edmund Harwick’s eyes were on him. Steady, waiting.
“But I think you already have it,” Eli said. “I think — I think the people who loved you gave it a long time ago. I think grief and forgiveness are the same thing, sometimes. You grieve because you loved. And because you loved—” he paused, finding his way through something that was too large for eight years, managing it with the instinct that had always been his: the instinct of a child who had spent his life looking at the dead and understanding what they carried, “—you are already forgiven. You have always been forgiven. You just couldn’t hear it from where you were.”
The barn was very still.
Edmund Harwick looked at Eli Crane and something in his face — the paper-grey, the terrible angle, the hundred-and-eleven-year agony of it — began to change. Not dramatically. Not with lights or sounds or any of the theatrical apparatus that Eli had somehow half-expected. It changed the way ice changes when warmth finally reaches it: slowly, from the edges inward, the rigidity relaxing, the fixed quality of the dead-face becoming something more mobile, more human.
He was crying.
Not with eyes. With his whole face. Some quality of released anguish that moved through him like a current.”Tell them,” Edmund said. His voice was clearer now, less the creak of old wood, more the voice of a man. “If you can. Tell them I knew, in the end. Tell them it was not their fault. Tell them—”
“I’ll tell them,” Eli said. He did not know how. He would find a way.
The light in the barn changed. Not the flashlight — something else, something that came from no source Eli could identify, a pale warm light that grew from the centre of the air around Edmund Harwick, that grew and brightened and inside it the shape of the man shifted, the hanging posture releasing, the feet touching the ground for the first time in a hundred and eleven years, the shoulders coming back to level, the terrible angle of the neck correcting itself.
And then the light was all there was, and then the light was gone.
The beam was empty.
The barn was cold but differently cold — the natural cold of a November night in a building with gaps in its walls, not the other cold, not the accumulated-dark cold of a century of suffering. Just cold.
From the house, Eli heard his mother scream.
He ran.