A Peculiar Grace Page 10

  She shook her head and said, “They always want to make you spend money on something, don’t they?”

  Hewitt ignored this. He said, “I’ve got some you could use. But I think he was tossing out a little test to see how you’d take it. Bill always uses a kicker on his baler and bales into high-sided wagons. Not the sort of deal where you stack the load but let it just pile up.” Wondering if he was right, wondering if Potwin was thinking about a nice tightly stacked load. Kicker loads always had a fair number of bent and broken bales. Not the kind you’d get three and a half dollars apiece for. It wasn’t his worry. If Bill Potwin could talk Jessica into doing the job the work might be good for her.

  “I’m going into town,” she said. “Anything I can pick up?”

  “Town?” he repeated, nerved up high just like that.

  “Lympus?” she said. “I drove through there the night I ended up on your hillside. Isn’t that the name?”

  He said, “Not much to Lympus anymore. The post office. A store of sorts, a gas station with some groceries and junk food and beer. You could get your fishing license there, buy nightcrawlers too. That’s about it.”

  “Sound’s fine,” she said. “It’s just a couple miles down the road isn’t it?”

  “Jessica, and I’m not being nosy, but I can’t imagine what you’d need there I probably don’t already have.” He still didn’t know her well enough to guess when or what might set her off as she’d been three days ago. And within this was a confusion, of wanting to keep her as much to himself as he could, at least for the time being.

  “You are too being nosy. I want to buy one of those phone cards.”

  “Oh hell,” he said. “Unless you’re going to call Spain and talk a couple hours you can use the phone in the house.”

  “What do you think? Am I overdressed for downtown Lympus?”

  He smiled despite himself. “They’ll notice you.”

  “That’s alright. They’d notice me anyway. And thanks but I’d as soon make my calls in private.”

  “I wasn’t planning on listening in.” Guessing she didn’t want the record of her calls on his phone bill.

  She nodded and said, “Well then, do you have any tampons?” A slow smirk of pleasure twitching the corners of her mouth. She went on, “And I’m the crazy daughter of an old friend of yours, is that the story?”

  He shook his head. “Going through a bit of hard time. Your fictional mother came up here a couple summers a long time ago. Dana Kimball. But there’s hardly anybody who remembers her. Nothing anybody’s going to grill you about.” Then because he couldn’t help himself he added, “You can buy lightweight leather work gloves at the store that would fit you. Mine would be too big and you’d end up with worse blisters than no gloves at all.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I thought you were going to help Bill Potwin put up hay.”

  She studied him a bit. She had the Volkswagen key out and was jingling it in one palm. She said, “Like I told you Hewitt. My boobs are not my eyes. I got no time for a fool thinks otherwise. Old Bill’s going to have to get along without me.” And she walked over and smacked an almost cartoon kiss on his cheek and walked on toward the shed. He watched her go. Her shoulders dropped into the length of her back and the dress drew against her hips and tightened over her ass as she walked. Abruptly she spun and dropped into a movie gunfighter crouch and pointed a finger pistol at him and said, “You are so busted.”

  Hewitt grinned at her. He said, “It’s biology is all it is Jessica.”

  “No,” she said. “Biology is a dissected frog.” She opened the door of the Bug and then said, “Lust is not a dissected frog. It’s a much uglier thing.”

  “I do believe,” Hewitt said, “there’s a strong distinction between the appreciation of beauty and lust.” As she stepped down into the little car. She started it and drove it out into the yard and pulled alongside him. Her window already cranked down. She had the trace of a grin again. She said, “I’m a frog, Hewitt. And don’t you forget it. Or I’ll tell my mama you’re a dirty old man.”

  And she pressed hard the gas and dropped into second and spun a plume of dust down the drive and he could see the brake lights flash through the dust as she came to the road and then she was out onto the blacktop and gone.

  So Jessica was down to Lympus. A good thing Hewitt decided. Even if she were to stay only a few more days, better to let his neighbors meet and learn something of her. The phone card nagged. He didn’t care really who she was calling. But had a glimmer of fear a handful of people met in her wayward trek might be alerted to a good place to come to. He didn’t think she’d do such a thing. But admitted he could not say for sure. He was disposed toward her but didn’t know the first thing about her.

  So he went strident with purpose down into the forge. To keep himself busy and not worry. He stirred the dead fire and pulled out a handful of clinkers and arranged the old coal with some new in a well and crumpled a single sheet of newspaper and struck a match to it. Burned that off and ignored the edges of coal showing lines of orange—the first sheet was to warm the chimney—and then wadded paper again and pulled the coal closer and fired it. This time waiting and watching for the right moment for a light puff from the hand-cranked bellows and watched and cranked again. There were jets of smoke and the chimney caught them and they rode up out of sight and the fire was lit. Now a matter of waiting for a hot working fire. Coal transformed to coke. Unsure what he’d do this day. He hadn’t yet looked at the huge gates.

  Sometime later that afternoon he heard Bill come down the hill and idle briefly in the farmyard but Hewitt did not come forth from the forge. By then he was working. He’d rifled through the stack of sketches for the gate and didn’t like any of the original ideas for how to fill the slender circles within the heavier woven straps. The main structure, the interwoven flattened and hammer-worked straps had been a design stolen from an accident. The autumn before he’d been in the carriage barn and his work boot came down hard upon an egg basket, a beauty at least a century old. Woven from inch-wide strips of ash split thin and soaked for pliability, it crushed and flattened under the heavy boot. And even while he was mourning the loss he was struck by the way the splintered basket did not fall apart but spread, the ash splits warped from the long tight weaving but opening as if a fan, a latticework holding a vestige of its old texture suggesting a new form—the geometry contained in the weaving, now set free but indelibly marked.

  So he returned to that original notion. Staring and squinting at the gates he saw immediately that the quarter-inch round stock he’d made circles from was the beginning of where he’d gone wrong. Those circles were not meant to hold anything and so broke the symmetry of the design. He spent the afternoon with a welding torch and a cold chisel and fine double-faced hammer, heating through the welds and tapping them free, swiftly using the cold chisel to remove traces of the weld from the flat bars as the circles fell away. He felt no remorse in undoing what had taken weeks of work—if you didn’t have the patience to undo what was not right you shouldn’t try to make anything. Not even a plank stand to nail a mailbox on a post.

  It was dusk when he finished. Thirty-two iron rings were neatly stacked and the gates were upright again, side by side, all beads and needles of the welding gone, filed off with a half round. He’d switched on the pair of adjustable floodlights overhead but could still see the pale twilit sky out the northern window lights. It was warm in the forge but not hot—he’d not ended up using the hearth so the fire had burned itself down, warmed the bricks and died away. For a time he sat on the bigger of the anvils. Not trying to figure a thing out. Just being there.

  He looked again at the gates and again the pile of circles.

  Tucked under the main workbench was a series of small deep drawers. Not something he had made but had come with the hemlock bench from Albert Farrell all those years ago. He pulled open the drawer under the bench vise. From the back he pulled out a car
ton of horseshoe nails, the cardboard softened with age and the blue lettering all but illegible. He removed a small stone pipe and an old metal screw top can that once held an assortment of cotter pins. He unscrewed the top and lifted out a tightly packed flowerbud half the size of his thumbnail and crushed it slightly as he placed it in the pipe. And sat on the anvil and smoked the pipe down. It was a year old but Jesus give a farmer a seed and within a couple of years he’d know what he was doing. Especially if he was motivated.

  He shut off the lights and stood a moment. There was more light now in those northern windows. He went up the stairs and out into the evening. The softening glow gone from the sun but not the land. And within this came floating down the crisp sweet smell of the new-cut hay.

  The house was dark. And he looked but already knew that Jessica was not back, the Volkswagen nowhere in sight.

  Twenty feet on toward the house he stopped. He paused and tipped back his head and studied the big elm behind the house, a risen thin-leafed crown. One of the last elms. So isolated as to almost be safe. He could draw a metaphor from that but decided against it. Thrust his hands deep into his jeans and rocked foot to foot. Trying to discern if it was true insight or simply an easy solution. Finally there was only one way to find out.

  He went back to the smithy and nursed the hand crank until orange appeared deep in the coals and pumped the foot bellows twice and sat back to wait. The fire came up fast, deep and hot. Good bituminous coal holds a fire. He did not need to measure a thing but took up one of the circles and placed it into the fire and pumped again the bellows and waited. When the metal was past orange but not quite cherry he lifted it quickly with tongs and held it upright on the anvil and beat the circle into an oval. He turned and tapped and reheated and tapped again and then cooled it in the brine. Lifted it and laid it atop the fire long enough to only warm and rubbed it down with a cloth crimped and dried with linseed oil and the oil went onto the warm surface and the cloth softened under his hand as he stood polishing. Then left the oval on top of the bench without even trying it against the gate.

  He shut things down again and went out into full dark. He’d walked this so many times it didn’t matter there was no light in the house. But in the dark he looked once again, already knowing the answer. Her car was not in the yard anywhere and was not in the cavern of the shed. So he went on. He was hungry.

  Jessica would have to take care of herself. Which she’d done before. Without thinking too much about it, he hoped she was doing that now.

  And on the bench in the smithy behind him was an oval. Which would not fit, he knew, but was the right idea. Two rows of ovals across the gates. Tips up, bellies down. The round stock would be flattened slightly, smoothly, all the way round. So the eggs would blend with the whole but retain the essential quality of an egg. Which was an unblemished thing.

  The rows of eggs would make the gate complete.

  The best things were always a mystery. But a mystery only worked if there was a grand design behind it. He and God understood each other. It had happened too many times for him to doubt. And, he reminded both himself and God, if he was wrong, who would know?

  He drank a beer while chopped bacon slowly cooked and then broke three eggs into the pan, sprinkled them with diced scallions and a handful of grated hunter’s cheddar, eight doses of Tabasco, salt and pepper. Stirred this slowly over low heat so the cheese melted into the eggs and the eggs gathered in light curds and he tipped this out onto a plate, rinsed out the iron skillet, set it back on the warm rangetop to dry and sat to eat. He had another beer with supper. As he ate the scheme and design for the gates fell fully into place. Along with the open ovals he’d hot-forge four solid iron eggs from heavier round stock—no mean trick but the job of crafting solid eggs from raw bar, the eggs perfect and unblemished, all by hammerwork stirred that edge of challenge. Two for the top of each gate, one on the inner and the other on the outer of the highest upright rods. So the iron eggs would appear to balance atop the points.

  He sat in the low glow of light from the kitchen for a time. The house was very quiet and familiar but there was also the sudden and strange sense of it being empty. He wondered where Jessica was, if he’d see her again. He wouldn’t let himself worry about her—there was no indication whatsoever that anyone in the world worrying about another person had ever once had any effect. Not to confuse worry with action but then for action you have to have direction and Hewitt was without direction as far as Jessica was concerned.

  SOMETIME AROUND THE end of the day that his father died and the beginning of the next Hewitt sat with his mother at the small table in the locked room in the basement. It was no accident Mary Margaret had pressed Hewitt to read the will before Beth arrived. All was straightforward enough, with assets and insurance policies intact.

  Then there was the codicil on a separate sheet of paper, the two short lines addressed only to Hewitt and his mother.

  He’d looked up from the will and said, “Why’s he leave Beth out of this part? It doesn’t seem right.”

  Mary Margaret Pearce poured out a great sigh, one that moved her entire upper body. She said, “There’s no earthly need for her to know any of this. We must trust your father’s wisdom, Hewitt. By the time he wrote this out, he knew her well, and knew what she might make of it. There’s damage enough as it is. It’s going to be hard enough to convince her why he chose to leave the paintings to you. Although she’ll be well pleased with the money, I suspect.”

  “Mother.”

  She held up her hand. “As I said, I love her as a mother loves a daughter. With clear eyes.”

  “Alright. But the sugarhouse?”

  Now Mary Margaret looked down where her hands were turning in her lap. Hewitt waited. When she finally looked up she was wet-faced and tears ran silent from both eyes. “Oh,” she said and caught her breath. “Oh isn’t it just like him Hewitt. You know it’s no accident it’s raining this night.”

  He was silent. Taking in this suggestion of how great she believed his father’s powers not only had been but remained. It was the grief of deep love.

  He stood and went behind her and held her shoulders, kneading gently, feeling those strong small shoulders suddenly gone weak and knobby. As her son he’d not until this night had to comfort his mother. Quietly he said, “You want to burn it now? Tonight?”

  She rocked against the pressure of his hands, just the right amount of love in touch she could tolerate from another human, son or not. After a bit she said, “No, no. I’ll call Robert Dutton and tell him what we plan for first light and see if, barring a true emergency, he could have a truck and small crew on hand. He wants the sugarhouse burned, we’ll burn it. But I won’t be looked on as a crazed widow.” And she craned her head up to look at her son. “Or perhaps a crazed widow but one had enough sense to have the fire department boys on hand.”

  She stood from under his hands and said, “Now lock this place tight and upstairs we go. There’s a story about your father you need to know.”

  “There’s more?”

  She looked at him and said, “There’s always more.”

  Upstairs they sat with glasses of wine as the steady autumn rain watered their reflections in the windows.

  “You remember your grandmother?” Mary Margaret asked.

  Hewitt was thinking about Emily, now driving through the night to be with him. After a moment he said, “I think I do. I know she was here some when I was little but, Mother, I can’t recall her face. I remember something of her. A sense of her being in a room or eating dinner with us. I felt uncomfortable around her. I guess just the fear of a little boy around someone I was supposed to know but didn’t really. I don’t think I was ever comfortable with her.”

  His mother studied him briefly and said, “You’d not be the first to feel that way around Lydia Pearce.”

  Then she said, “Although it’s a curious thing about mothers; any disaster that befalls their children could’ve been averted if only they�
��d been present. And so there she was, first stuck in Holland and then evacuated to England but unable to get home for the duration of the war. And finally home just long enough to get to know her son’s wife and young daughter when they were lost. It was several years before I was to meet her and she was far too fine and grand to be hostile toward me but there was a caginess about her that never went away. I think by then she’d grown wary of all the workings of the world and perhaps she had better reasons for that than some. But I’m meandering.”

  THOMAS PEARCE SKETCHED and sketched but threw everything away. Sometimes she’d not see him for days at a time, even after without great discussion one Sunday afternoon he moved her belongings into his studio, Thomas going out the next day while she was at work to purchase a sturdy chest of drawers and comfortable chair for her. He worked little in the studio but would always turn up, middle of the night or any time of day with his sketchpad and box of hard and soft pencils, the case with the pens and small compartments for nibs and tucked-tight bottles of ink. But if there was ever anything completed and brought home she never saw it.

  The easel and paints and stretched canvases remained untouched. And he didn’t talk about it or complain or voice his frustration in any way. Except the deeply brutal brooding. Her girlfriends told her she was crazy living this life lacking all signals of permanency and she laughed and agreed with them and went on her way. The kitchen manager of her hotel learned she was living with a man and fired her and she told Thomas nothing of this but simply walked a dozen blocks and found a job in another hotel with the same hours and in the interview all she said was that her husband was disabled from the war and that was enough. And she felt less guilt over living with him without the sanction of the church than she did from this lie; not because of the lie but the terrible truth that lay behind it. As far as she was concerned she was married to Thomas Pearce. She was as bound to him as any life she could imagine and in ways she couldn’t articulate even to herself lying silent in bed beside him at three o’clock in the morning but she knew it was true.