A Peculiar Grace Read online

  He drank tepid water from the sink and threw up again. He went naked into the bedroom and plugged in the two-cup coffeemaker. Then back for a long scalding shower, heavily soaping and rinsing his genitals several times. At the end he turned the hot off and stood enduring the cold pouring over him until his scalp ached. Little tricks that were nothing but cheap stand-ins for time. The quick single shot remedy had been abandoned years ago. Toweling off he told himself he’d find some breakfast and then gas up the preposterous Thunderbird and go home. He was a fool, had always been a fool and probably always would be.

  * * *

  WHEN HE’D LEFT her porch and driven slowly down toward the lake and the layered beauty of sunset reflected on the water, he was not feeling so much a fool as the recipient of a gut response and he had no idea what came next. Except the obvious which was to return to the last place, the scene of the scene so to speak, the scene of the crime although to this very day he was not certain what that crime was beyond the inevitable still incomprehensible divergence he hadn’t seen coming, or had denied the signals she did float like small paper boats in the bloodstream of their lives that second fall. So he drove along the Bluff following those familiar roads until he came upon the driveway to the Ark and saw the new white brick columns and the fancy-looking cheap gates, the grounds cleared as far as he could see up the drive and he knew whatever lay up that drive, whether the old house restored or something newly built, wouldn’t resemble the place of his memory. He drove on and up the backroads through the scrub and vineyards until he came to the high end of the Bluff where he watched the last of the sunset, as the first night she’d brought him here.

  That second summer Hewitt had arrived in time for her high school graduation which followed a week after his own, the spring when as soon as the frost was out of the ground he’d had the bank excavated and Gordy Peeks began the brickwork of the forge but once he walked across the stage and gathered his diploma he kissed his mother and went to where the Volvo sat parked, packed and waiting and drove west. And because this summer was different he was more determined than ever to learn, to wring every bit of knowledge he could from Timothy who was glad to see him in his undemonstrative way and Timothy seemed also to comprehend the difference, partly no doubt from the inclusion beginning late the summer before of Emily who dropped in one afternoon about an hour before they were done work for the day, Emily in denim cutoffs and a tank top, her long braid swinging over her butt. Hewitt had long ago learned the hard way to tuck his own braid into the front not back of his shirt since the bending and straightening over the anvil would work it free if tucked in behind and the brittle whiff of burnt hair would cause Timothy to shake his head and chuckle. And Hewitt had visited Timothy on more than a few of his weekend trips to see Emily during the year. So without it being spoken of all three knew this summer was different, that in the words of more than one commencement speaker one world was being left behind as a new world was being entered.

  Hewitt knew Emily had written letters late that spring deferring her entrance into Cornell as well as polite rejections to Alfred, Hamilton, Colgate and SUNY New Paltz, and Hewitt, with no plans at all to attend college had lightly joked it was the year of living by one’s wits; this the afternoon he helped two of Emily’s high school girlfriends pack their Karmann Ghia with camping gear to head south toward the coast of North Carolina and the Outer Banks, where they intended to travel as much as possible the barrier islands south until Florida where they’d make a beeline for the Keys and a winter on the Gulf of Mexico—Hewitt silently grateful for those girls and their choice as it seemed to lessen the moody hesitation that had overtaken Emily during the time between her writing the letter to Cornell and actually mailing it. But as he’d nervously hoped once he arrived and summer was underway they had a fine high old time, Hewitt working long hours with Timothy but now with the weekends completely his own, more than compensated for by not only what he’d learned the summer before but the time he’d spent in Albert Farrell’s forge over the winter and even as he carried his accomplishment and ability well he was always quick to step back and watch Timothy take over something new, something complicated, work to be witnessed before attempted. Emily had kept her old job nights and weekends over the winter but three days after her graduation was fired when she didn’t show up one morning for work, the result of an unanticipated large quantity of mushrooms consumed with Hewitt and the folks out at the Ark—Max the solitary drummer, Ken the bass player and his lady Barb, Willie the Wonder Boy lead guitar player and whichever girl was around that night, Dave the keyboard player and his lady Stacey, and Drew the rhythm guitar. The residents. As well as a handful of other usual suspects. And while within days she was working at another restaurant and making real tips instead of a crummy check, in the course of that long night the Ark began to be their second home, or rather the place where they could always go. Willie held the lease, or it belonged to some member of his family but in any event he gathered rent and also decided largely who could and couldn’t live there. Mostly it was the band. There were empty bedrooms and they all liked it that way—plenty of room for wayfarers but none that could take up permanent residency. With the exception of Drew who was only a couple of years older than Hewitt and Emily, the band had been in the house for ten years, enough time as Willie said for the sixties to finally fade into whatever the seventies was all about and Willie had greater authority beyond proprietary; it was he after all who’d gone AWOL in 1968 and holed up in the house until the day the sheriff and state trooper cruisers pulled in along with an unmarked black sedan and he crawled out of his elaborate hideout in the attic after spying them through his peephole and covered with dust and bat shit had walked right out and offered no resistance even when one of the MPs grabbed his hair in a knot and slammed his face on to the roof of the car, sending roses of blood down his shirtfront before they loaded him in and drove off and this was not a sense of patriotic duty or inevitability Willie felt but rather the fact his housemates had three keys of Mexican grass and five hundred hits of windowpane along with a baggie of assorted reds and yellowjackets and white-crosses and a month later when he had his pre-court-martial hearing he was stoked on smuggled MDA and talked nonstop for two meetings in the morning with officers and army shrinks and right through a solitary lunch and then through the more formal hearing in the afternoon which concluded with an exasperated offer of a less-than-honorable discharge whereupon he became highly agitated at this affront to his honor and after another harangue he was declared unfit for service at which, famously, Willie finally paused and fully serious said, “I most certainly am.” It was Max who drove through a sleet storm to pick him up, Max then not yet shaved but with black hair under a rolled red bandana and his face painted red black and green and when the pissed off guards finally brought Willie out one of them said to Max, “We’ll get your ass, Tonto,” and Max smiled and said, “Sorry man. Sovereign nation status. Check it out.” Twenty hours later the sleet had turned to ice and at three in the morning the whole crew had made their way to downtown Bluffport tripping their asses off and when the deputy sheriff finally managed to bring his cruiser to a sliding stop nose-in against an iced-over parked car and demanded what the hell they thought they were up to it was Max again who grinned and said, “Sliding. We’re sliding, man. Want to try?” Local legend. From the beginning there’d been an unnamed tension, mild dislike, between Hewitt and Willie but nevertheless Hewitt respected him, knowing the courage and outrage needed for his life.

  The summer before, they’d gotten to know Hewitt and accepted him although at first he knew it was because of Emily but by the second summer he felt he was holding his own and so the Ark became their occasional second home, where without it ever being discussed they had their own room which Emily painted and decorated with Indian printed fabrics and a pair of splintery wicker lawn chairs and a new mattress on the floor, the mattress Hewitt insisted on buying rather than going to the used furniture store in town and when the
y hauled it in and wrestled it up the stairs there was a round of applause, no offers to help but a flurry of lewd suggestions. Still mostly they slept apart, Hewitt in the loft of Timothy’s forge and Emily at her parents’. Where at the beginning of summer there was a decidedly notable tension which Hewitt ignored as much as he could and Emily handled mostly silently but after a couple of times trying to talk to her about it he realized he more than she was the central target although never to his face. But it was the pitchfork in his ass that in early July prompted him to suggest to Timothy if he was to share the cost and buy the stock outright he be allowed to produce some of his own work to try and sell. It had taken Timothy two long silent days to agree to this and so Hewitt assembled a pair of display boards of kitchen utensils and various hooks, hinges, latches and decorative hardware that even then he knew was only a beginning but also was equal to similar work coming out of the forge and so one weekend he and Emily loaded the goods into the car and drove back to Vermont for a few days where with little effort he placed one of the displays in the gift shop of the Woodstock Inn and the other at the Equinox in Manchester, all on a commission basis but as high-end as he could hope for. And the work sold and orders came in and it was good to be making money from his effort and, he knew certainly now, skill, artisanship.

  It was a grand summer. They spent time with her family, both at the farm and at the lake cottage and many long nights at the Ark rock and rolling or just sliding in the groove and sometimes late on those nights with a candle stuck in a bottle for light they’d lie in bed and Hewitt would talk about his own forge and what he hoped for it and sometimes his grander ambitions which were already forming, although outside of books he’d seen little of the work he envisioned. His mother was home and planned to stay there until as she said, “You marry that girl and come back here and set up shop and then I’ll get out of your hair. Your grandmother was smart enough to do that for your father and myself and you deserve the same. You’re an artist, you know Hewitt. Take it seriously as your father did and my life will be happy again.”

  The week after Labor Day one morning Timothy was sitting in the forge waiting when Hewitt climbed down the ladder from the loft.

  He said, “The summer’s over.”

  Hewitt said, “It’s getting that way, isn’t it.”

  Timothy looked down and scraped some cinders into the dirt floor with his boot. Then he looked back up and said, “I’ve taught you most all I know and the rest you have to learn on your own or it won’t mean a thing to you. And it’s time I’m getting back to my own solitary ways. You need to go home and finish building the grand smithy you’ve told me of and get to work on your own.”

  Hewitt laced his boots. “I thought there’d be no harm in working together through the fall.”

  Timothy looked long upon him and then shook his head.

  Hewitt said, “Are you kicking me out?”

  Timothy said, “It’s time for you to go.”

  EMILY AND HEWITT moved into the Ark. It was the roller-coaster autumn, the fall of cocaine.

  Early on, as the resorts in Vermont were gearing up for their fall foliage season he’d been forced to make a lightning trip back to retrieve the near empty display boards and offer poor excuses why he’d be unable to fill orders for the time being. They’d stopped for an overnight with his mother and Emily spent most of an afternoon hiking the land and then studying Hewitt’s half-finished forge, the hearth and brick walls built in his absence but otherwise a shell. He’d found her there, sitting on a round of rock maple intended one day for an anvil and squatted beside her, one hand on her knee and waited like that until she’d looked at him and said, “Why don’t you come back and finish this, Hewitt? You could have it ready before winter,” and he’d met her eyes and asked if she’d come with him and she’d looked away, not yet ready to answer and he wasn’t about to push. Although they had one of their first furious fights on the drive back to Bluff-port the next day over his intention to press on to the next service area on the thruway despite her flatly expressed need to pee. The last hour of the trip in silence until they carried their backpacks up to their room in the Ark, turned and looked at each other and she began to laugh.

  They picked grapes, cold in the morning dew and sweating in the afternoon sun, working fast as they could down the rows to get ahead of their coworkers so they could snort spoons which let them get even further ahead so they could smoke one of the joints Emily rolled each morning and brought in an old Bugler cigarette tin, then do another spoon to gain their lost ground. When the grapes slowed they picked apples and then went back to the vineyards for the last of the wine grapes, those left on the vine until the last possible handful of days. It was briefly a satisfying time—the weather high autumn, the sky filled with geese in a way he’d only seen flecks of in Vermont and rolling fleets of autumn clouds, scurrying shadows here and then gone over them and while the weather held it seemed they were within the vestige of a waking dream. Emily didn’t really like coke which didn’t stop her from taking it when offered and while it was wonderful in bed for both of them afterward it left her quiet and withdrawn. Hewitt would stretch on the bed under the covers of old quilts and sleeping bags and watch her curled in a blanket in one of the chairs, sometimes reading but often as not gazing at the blank black window and more than once he thought of the house in Lympus and how she’d fit there and wondering why he just didn’t ask her to go there with him now—even with winter coming on he could roof and outfit the forge in a few short weeks and have it up and running by the first of the year. But he didn’t, partly because he was having too much fun most of the time.

  Partly because he feared she’d say No.

  As the weather turned cold she returned to her waitress job and Hewitt went back to work in the vineyards, following the trimmers to pull the cut vines, the brush, the long new growth from their twisted lives on the wires stretched taut. On cold days the brush would come free with a whip-crack and snap against his cheek, hard enough to bring tears to his eyes. More than once he quit and walked off the job only to return to a near empty Ark where everyone now except Willie was out at day jobs and it was ever more clear Willie didn’t really like Hewitt. At the time Hewitt thought this was jealousy over Emily; years later he figured out Willie already knew he was a short-timer. And now it was Emily who brought home the greater share of groceries and the big house was cold except for the kitchen and the band room that had a large gas heater. Old coal grates were in all the bedrooms but the chimneys were bad and they couldn’t be used. Portable kerosene heaters were used although if one was left on during the day in a feeble attempt to maintain warmth in the room, the occupant would return to find it shut down. This Hewitt understood—Willie’s fear of fire—but he kept out of those long-running disputes. Evenings they’d drink homemade wine and smoke dope and sometimes the band would play but as often sit huddled in the big room and listen to records or reel-to-reel bootlegs of Dylan or Janis or the Dead. All of which more or less depressed Hewitt—it was warmer somewhere else and he’d be slumped in the broken sofa, the heater flickering queer blue and orange reflections on the ceiling when he’d realize Emily was watching him. Often when he’d look, she’d be looking away.

  It wasn’t all bad. Days off they’d take long walks through the snow-skimmed woods hand in hand or chase each other, laughing until one or the other would fall to the ground and then be tackled gently. Evenings they’d drive into town and drink Irish coffees for the heat and flush it gave them and sit outside later in the running car kissing each other as if for the first time. Or out with the band when they gigged and those were wonderful nights because whatever else was working or not between them once dancing they were again as smoothly connected as if they’d been born that way. And always love, even after the fights over who ate the last Oreos or forgot to buy bread, even the argument when she threw a cheap aluminum pot at him and dented the pot and the old plaster where it hit and Willie had stood up, about to speak when Emi
ly said, “Oh fuck off Willie,” and chased Hewitt upstairs to grapple on the bed and leave the clamps of her toothmarks on his upper arms, that would throb the next day in the cold lowering sunlight, the marks of her love upon him, the idea that she would consume him, eat him if she could. This physical pain was nothing compared to how he felt looking at her, how he felt away from her only a few hours and how she felt also, he knew. So at Thanksgiving which proved to be a wonderful time, a warmish spell brought rain the night before and then a pale sun and warmth on the day itself, a turkey stuffed with mushrooms and hash brownies for dessert, the house filled with people. That evening in the kitchen after he’d happily volunteered himself and Emily to clean up while the band was setting up, leaning back against the sink and holding her, their hands running up and down each other, her eyes lit and tender and teasing, the love flowing from her suddenly overwhelmed him and he went to his knees, his arms around her and his head pressed to her stomach, almost crying, just holding on to what he knew was his very life and in those moments before he’d slid down saw she knew it too. Later that night as she slept beside him and the music had long died away except the unknown melodies running through his head he resolved that at Christmastime, that unspoken quiet anniversary of sorts, he’d tell her it was time to go, time for them to go back together to Vermont and by spring the forge would be running and she could do what she wanted; he was thinking UVM for premed and then wherever she needed or wanted for medical school. Dartmouth, for that matter, as much as he disliked it had gone coed a few years before and there was a good program there. Or Massachusetts. Far more—anything she wanted.