A Peculiar Grace Read online

  “I’m lost,” she said. “Not stupid.”

  “Well, sit over breakfast with me and maybe we can figure out where you got turned around.”

  Her mouth tightened, lips pressed. As if trying to learn if she was being led or not. Then she said, “I’ll watch you eat. But Hewitt …”

  “What is it?”

  “Stop staring at my boobs. Okay?”

  “Why don’t you get in your car?” he said.

  * * *

  WHATEVER SHE WAS or whatever she lacked she knew how to handle her car being towed through the woods backward and downhill. Hewitt appreciated this but the slow trip down gave him time to ponder this peculiar woman and he’d determined to give her the gas and send her on her way. He had too much to cope with as it was, although he refused to attempt numeration. He was not the man to take on someone else’s problems. Not beyond a fifteen-minute solution anyway and that only applied if the problem was practical, tactile, something he could lay hands on and repair. So they came to a slow moderate halt in the farmyard, with a nice slack in the chain.

  What he’d failed to consider was a change in her. She was out of the car down on her knees working the chain free before he even had the tractor shut down and so he removed the clevis and pin from the drawbar as she raised up and they walked toward each other looping up the heavy chain. She said, “I was raised with better manners than I’ve shown and I’ve been living off Coca-Cola and candy bars since I don’t know when. I surely could eat a plate of eggs and toast.” Then as if his hesitancy had transmitted itself she backpedaled and said, “Although I wouldn’t put you out. You’ve been so kind and I bet you’ve got better things to do than put up with me so I’d be just tickled with the gas and go.”

  WITH THE EXCEPTION of a few conveniences added, the house was essentially unchanged from when his father returned in 1951 with his new wife. Beth was born a year later and Hewitt six years after her. The house was late Victorian with the large rooms, tall windows and rich woodwork and detailed trim of the time. Hewitt had only vague memories of his grandmother Pearce. He never had known his grandfather, any more than his father had known that man—a secret of history, an intrigue deepened by the fact that his great-grandparents, who’d built the house and prospered with a bobbin shop factory as well as the sheds and sawmills for the raw timber and ownership in the railroad spur line, were Pearces as well. Thomas Pearce then, a man seemingly shorn of paternity. Confounding the mystery, grandmother Lydia Pearce had died not at home but in Holland, in Amsterdam, a city where after she’d raised her son Thomas and seen him off to the Pratt Institute to study art, she’d spent months at a time annually until her death. She was buried up the road in the Pearce Cemetery where also rested an assortment of Snows, Duttons and Peeks.

  The kitchen held a giant wood-burning range in soft charcoal black rimmed with heavy chrome aprons and trim and had double ovens and two cooktops, one meant for kerosene but now connected to a propane tank outside. Cabinets formed a dividing wall to the dining room—built not against but within the walls, two sets with glass fronts for fancy display. The kitchen table was drop-leaf bird’s-eye maple that almost certainly had made the trip by oxcart north toward the end of the eighteenth century, the construction pegged and dovetailed, free of nails altogether and without a wobble. The dining room table could seat twelve and had not been used in years.

  Jessica wandered the room while he worked at the range after putting new grounds and running fresh water into the coffeemaker. He’d done this without asking, her confession of her diet enough to tell him she would need coffee. The eggs were big with blood spots in the yolks, the gas turned low to cook them soft and slow.

  They sat across from each other and ate. There was thick toast and tall glasses of orange juice. He broke a piece of toast into quarters and used them to mop the yolk and bits of white and cleaned his plate. Eating but watching her across from him. And doing his best to smile with his eyes. She was only halfway done eating, using her fork to cut small pieces of the whites of the eggs and dip them into the carefully broken but intact liquid yolks and bring them to her mouth. Not nibbling but savoring, making it last. Christ—Coke and candy bars. He stood and took his plate to the sink and poured two mugs of black coffee. He didn’t need or want more coffee. But it was a prop and life wants props. He blew the surface for the updraft scroll of steam and pretended to take a small sip. He was in deep debate he’d already lost.

  He said, “Jessica? Do you have clean clothes in your car?”

  Her face tightened as he knew it would. “Why?”

  He sighed, a sound he meant her to hear. “Because I think you don’t. When’s the last time you had a bath or shower?”

  “I don’t believe I care for the way this is going.”

  He sighed again. Then shook his head, nothing more than that. “What I was thinking. Is that you could do some laundry here. Maybe even wash yourself up. Because you need it. I can tell you that from over here. Again, and you listen to me—I’ve been closer to where you are then you can imagine.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with me,” she interrupted.

  “I know that. Except both you and your clothes are wicked dirty. You wanted, you could take a couple hours and leave here good to go for quite a while.” He paused and then said, “The way things are right now all that needs to happen is for some cop to pull you over and you’d have an awful tough time talking your way clear. You understand that?”

  She was silent.

  He did not wait but stood and said, “Come on. I’ll get you a laundry basket and show you the machines and the big bathroom. I was you I’d take a bath. Soak it out of you. But you can shower if you want. I won’t bother you. I’ve got work to do.”

  She did not move but looked close upon him. That shadow was back on her face but underneath he now saw something else. Then she stood and said, “Those were good eggs. I thank you.” He was afraid he’d lost her. Then she went on. “If you’re serious I could use to do some laundry. And a bath would be sweet.”

  “All right. Let me show you where the basket is.”

  “Wait,” she said. “Let me show you something first.” And very fast dipped a hand into her shirt and came out with a straight razor on a shoelace. As the razor came free of her shirt she snapped the blade open and it was the brightest thing in the room except her eyes. “You see this?”

  He nodded. “I’ve seen them before. Come on, I’ve got work to do.”

  AFTER HELPING CARRY the reeking mounds of clothing to the house and showing her everything he could possibly think of he left her alone. He had no energy for the forge. So he took the wheelbarrow and a fork and rake and went into the flower beds and cleaned out what he should’ve a month ago. Everything was sprouting so most of the work was done on hands and knees and slow going. Which fit his mood. Restless, mildly rankled. And then found himself whistling as he pulled dead Siberian iris stems free from the slender bright new shoots pointed as if determined to learn the sky. After this he just worked. He cleared all the beds and wheeled loads of composted ancient manure from the barn pit to spread on the beds and then walked down past the forge to the small spring seep and stepping carefully used his pocketknife to cut the first dozen stalks of asparagus.

  And stood holding the tender green spears in one hand and the clasp knife in the other and abruptly turned and ran to the house. In the kitchen he paused to compose himself. Laid the asparagus on the sink and listened to the house. The washer had stopped and there was no sound.

  He went up the stairs to the big bathroom. He tapped lightly on the door but it was silent within. He could picture the water flooded and diluted rose. Or perhaps not so diluted. How much blood would a body offer against a few gallons of water? He took a breath and opened the door.

  The tub was empty but for a gray grimed ring three quarters up. With a foamy residue of bubbles. There hadn’t been bubble bath in the house for years and he knew it for a fact because when Amber Potwin left she’d
cleaned the bathroom of all trace of her. But on the floor leaning against a clawfoot was the bottle of dishsoap from the kitchen drainboard. He almost smiled.

  He went out past his own open bedroom door and to the next room down, the door there open as well. She was sprawled under a sheet with her hands beneath the pillow, elbows extended flat, one knee drawn up so the rise of her hip rounded up the sheet. Her hair was flying off her head in wet spikes from the toweling. Her mouth was open and she was breathing deeply. The cracked yellowed shade was pulled down on the bedside window but for the last couple of inches—fresh air. He looked but the wet balled towel was all there was on the floor. She was clearly naked under the sheet. Gently he pulled up the white cotton spread, thin and ancient even when he was a child, covering her only to her hips. Then he took the balled towel and went downstairs.

  There was a load of wet washed clothes sitting in the washer. And a heap of stinking dirty clothes before it. The dryer was empty. He thought about it all for a minute and went back upstairs to his own room and dug free the pair of sweatpants shrunk too small for him. And an old soft T-shirt. He carried them down the hall and left them folded on the bedside table. He stood beside the bed and watched her sleep. Finally he leaned and kissed the crown of her head and left the room.

  He didn’t have any idea how to spend the day.

  THAT SUMMER OF the Bicentennial.

  The granddaughter of immigrant Danes, Emily Soren with snapping blue eyes that at times seemed green and oatstraw hair in a braid near to her waist or pulled back peasant-style under a kerchief, whose first words to Hewitt Pearce were “I know who you are” and last ones a year and a half later were “Keep the tears for yourself, Hewitt, I don’t want them anymore” was by any reckoning from the moment she uttered those first five words or even the moments before as she approached him that early summer day carrying to his car the tray with his cheeseburger and strawberry milkshake just in the way she walked toward him seeing something he’d never seen before or the nearinvisible hairs along her forearms that struck and entered him with a force both stunning and long-expected like brushing against an electric fence jolts, the one person on earth he was born to meet although it would be years of pondering that would allow him to see the multiple strands that led up to that time for both of them and those same long years pondering the events and likewise strands that led to her final statement. At first he couldn’t, absolutely in his deepest core could not accept the idea that his wild-hearted passion of impossible range would not in the end slice through and be recognized for the inevitability that it was; that the sheer velocity of this passion had initially set their mutual course like twin blazing comets across the eons of the universe; and then later could not believe she had seen this, reciprocated, and then ultimately denied it. How could he not hold that as the simple most basic touchstone of his life? How could she flee?

  Of course in the end he’d behaved badly. Not from intention and certainly not from malice but from stark utter disbelief as those comets either collided too hard and broke to fragments or simply slid by each other after a long grazing spark-laden interval.

  Over time he realized almost everyone gets their heart broken and is expected to rise out of that, to learn and go along. But Hewitt’s heart was not broken but split by a chisel and some part, something greater he came to realize than half was irrevocably gone. Finally he knew it didn’t matter if this was a failure of a version of maturity on his part or not; it was how it was. It was what he got and every single day of his life he ached with the only real prayer he’d ever known—that Emily Soren was healthy and happy with where life had taken her. It was, this minor religious penance, the least he could do.

  They were both seventeen, the summer before their final year of high school and she was right where she’d spent her entire life although Hewitt was three hundred miles west of home working with the smith Timothy Farrell and had finished his half-day Saturday and so was free until Monday dawn. He’d showered in the outside stall beside Timothy’s forge and tossed his hiking boots into the backseat of the old Volvo, his hair released from its braid clean and flowing down his back and over his shoulders, dressed in cutoff jeans and a pearl-snap button western denim shirt with the sleeves rolled up, his bare feet glorious on the pedals as he drove down off the hill above the lake and toward Bluffport with no idea what he’d find but certain he’d find something and slowly cruised through town until he saw the drive-in burger joint and thought food was a good place to start and Emily Soren walked out with the order he’d repeated twice through the shaky tilted metal speaker. And even then watching her come and seeing everything like that first tingle of acid kicking in, would not have guessed it would be dawn Sunday before he’d sleep again. But at the time and forever after knew he was ready for whatever she brought.

  “I know who you are,” she said, hooking the tray on the doorframe, leaning in close to do it and holding there, waiting.

  “Not yet, you don’t,” he said. “But you should.” She had a pair of hammered silver bangles on her left wrist and a nice piece of almost green turquoise wrapped in a net of fine silver wire from a leather choker around her neck. Hewitt had a similar turquoise and silver stud in his left ear. She squinted a caution not reflected in her laughing eyes and said, “What makes you think so?”

  “I don’t know,” he admitted. “It just sounds like a good idea.”

  Fifteen hours later they were sitting back to back on the long dock of her family’s summer cottage not truly opened for the summer watching the sky lighten and stars wink out, a planet high and streaks of clouds turning from low dull blueblack to a slow simmering burn of sunrise approaching, the still lake with its small wavelets a somewhat denser mirror of color, Emily with her legs crossed before her and Hewitt with his knees up, their spines aligned side to side, sitting in the long silence of the end of a long night and the sublime beginning of the day and it had been her hand that crept easily back and found his. As he gently held her hand he knew he’d recall the feel of her hand, of her life flowing through it and against his, for all the days that remained to him. And so the night went down and they sat within the nether light of predawn.

  He’d picked her up when she got off work at the Keuka Farms drive-in and as agreed driven her home to meet her parents Ellen and Gregor and an assortment of younger and older siblings he couldn’t keep straight, being sent to the barn to chat with her father as he finished the evening milking. In the barn he made no attempt to help but instead followed her father from cow to cow as he milked and they talked about farming which Hewitt knew from helping his own father tend the homestead in Lympus and work he’d pitched in with among neighbors during the spring sugaring, the summer haying and fall getting up firewood and such, knew enough to know the farm he was upon was a vastly richer, more demanding and rewarding enterprise than those he knew and so was able to ask the right questions, offer comparisons based on experience and also checked but appropriate praise and honest appreciation. Gregor had a white paintbrush mustache and the same eyes as his daughter and wore a striped railroad engineer’s cap tilted back to allow him not only to bring his face close to the side of the cow but look up at Hewitt without craning his neck. Several male children worked along, the older ones milking ahead or behind their father, the younger ones feeding calves or forking out stalls and one young girl perhaps eight or ten kept appearing and disappearing, bringing Hewitt one after another young or older barn cats for his admiration. About this child Gregor said as if in passing, “She’s a pistol, that one,” and then spoke shortly and to the point of his esteem for Timothy Farrell—a commentary Hewitt understood he was not expected to respond to beyond mild affirmations and was Soren’s blessing and warning at once. Then all into the house for a mighty supper.

  Driving out into the bright early evening Emily turned to Hewitt and said, “Dad’s not made his mind up about you. Far from it. But he and I came to terms a couple years ago and while he doesn’t always pretend he like
s it he knows he’s got no choice but to trust me.” She had changed out of the bad shamrock green Keuka Farms T-shirt and still in her jeans was wearing a Danskin sleeveless top and carried along a flannel shirt. Then she dug down into her jeans and pulled up a bottle cap sealed tight with twisted plastic wrap. She said, “I’ve got this red Lebanese hash oil but nothing to smoke it with.”

  Hewitt was again barefoot. “There’s a little bag of Colombian gold in the glove compartment, along with papers and a pipe. You can dab some of the oil on the screen and then pack it or if you know how the best thing is to spread a smear of the oil on top of the weed just before you twist up the joint.”

  “I can roll just fine. You got a matchstick to spread the oil?”

  He reached up on the dash and from the accumulation there plucked out a matchbook and handed it over. He was quiet while she quickly rolled up what he already knew was a killer joint and then while she was blowing on it, turning it in her fingertips to dry it he said, “So is there a plan?”

  “You need a plan, Hewitt?”

  “Nope. You going to light that or you want me to?”

  “It’s not quite ready. Almost. The oil needs to soak in.”

  “I know that.”

  “Then why’d you ask? Oh fuck it, I’m ready to get high. There’s always more where that came from. And there’s a party. Are you up for a party, Hewitt?”

  “Fire that up. I’m always ready for a party.”

  “You sure you don’t want to get high first and drive around and then decide?”

  “That party hasn’t even started yet, has it?”

  “Of course it has. And someone’s always got to be the first to show up.”

  “Hey Emily?”

  “Yup?”

  “You going to talk or you going to light that joint?”

  She was quiet until he looked over at her. He was already lost, up on the high country between the lakes where it was farm after farm spreading out all around and all he knew was where west was. When he looked at her she was waiting. “Hewitt?” she said. Then stuck the joint in her mouth and fired a match and hit it hard and held it as the dense sweet smell of the oil filled the car. Then she passed it over to him and slowly exhaled. “Hewitt,” she said again as he toked. “Let’s get ripped.”