A Peculiar Grace Read online

  How he worked. From noon until three in the morning and back up two hours later to work again until sunset. Then dinner and a short exhausted sleep on the sofa trickling in and out as Celeste read to Susan and bathed her and put her to bed and then came to him and slowly woke him and they would sit talking quiet, or loving, and then she’d go to bed as he brewed a pot of coffee and went back to work. How this would go on for days at a time, weeks even, and then he’d fall apart and sleep three or four days around the clock waking only to eat once or twice, then always beefsteak and nothing more with a tumbler of whisky and back to sleep. And how sometime during this wonderful catastrophic haze he lost sense of things, lost track of himself and of his two girls, as he thought of them.

  That night two years ago. The second autumn after the war. A soft evening when he’d finished a marathon of three linked paintings, of days and days he couldn’t count and so kissed his daughter and spat a No at his wife with her offered dinner and walked out and down the block around the corner to a bar because his head was blistered and reeling and he needed not quiet so much as nothing demanded or wanted or hoped of him for a few hours and how he sat there into the dark hours and even heard the sirens and saw the window-speckle of racing fire engine lights and pushed his glass across the bar for another drink. And was sipping that down when a man, a neighbor he knew only by face, was pummeling his shoulders and shouting at him and Thomas Pearce knocked over his stool and ran out and up the street already seeing the fire rising above the buildings, already knowing what he was heading toward.

  And stood at the inner edge of the great circle of watchers, the inner circle a snake nest of canvas hoses and huge puffing pumper trucks and the useless ladder extended toward an empty flame-licked blackness of night, held back by men sanctioned to be within that circle from which he was excluded, the firefighters and the nervous less well-protected police as the top half of the building spewed upward and as he knew he would Thomas Pearce heard the popping explosions of jars of turpentine and thinners within the abhorrent tornado of fire and standing there, held there, restrained, he saw clear as if he was within the leaping orange fluid structure, the pile of rags soaked with spirits and gum and turpentine that had accumulated to the side of his big easel, into the corner to rest and ferment and foment.

  To be picked up and discarded another day.

  Last thing he said to Mary Margaret Duffy before she sank backward to the curb and cried as he stood silent before the rebuilt building, arms strapped across his chest was, “Once it sank in there was no hope I pulled away from those men. Of course they needed to talk to me, wanted to talk to me. But I got free and walked away. I walked for days. Days and nights. It was both of them, I want you to understand that. It was all of it. But what comes back over me again and again, what I do not understand and never will was Susan. She was not just another person. She was her very own self all ways but she was part of me. She came from part of me. Where did she go? Where did my Susan go?”

  HEWITT COULD LEARN nothing more. There were no photographs, no letters, no papers left behind. His mother would not or could not recall his father’s first wife’s family name or where she came from. She did not know where they were buried. His father, if he ever visited those graves, did so alone on one of his occasional trips to New York. Or wherever they might be. So he had two names and the enormity of what his father silently lived with. All those winter evenings with a big fire popping in the old fireplace in the living room how often had his father stared deep into those flames and considered those other greater malignant flames? Twice a year birthdays came and went unnoted. And two anniversaries. The one in stark counterpoint to the other but both annual bookends of a sort.

  And now, at three in the morning, older than his father not only when he lost his first family but gained the strength and courage to try again, Hewitt Pearce stood at his night window and looked out on the summer starlit land and was most amazed by the love that pierced the brooding man. He wondered at the struggles held silent in his love for his family. For the love between his parents had been a visible thing, a vivid living presence that enveloped them all. A strong man, Hewitt thought. Trying to determine the difference between the passion of one’s life and the love of one’s life. And could not. Yes, a strong man. Stronger than himself.

  Two

  Despite his restless night he was up early. He was always up early. Winter mornings he slept in, sometimes until six o’clock. When summer days were longest he might lie in bed past four listening to the birds rioting over the pleasure of a new day for as much as half an hour before rising. The house this morning was cooled down but the kitchen held a touch of warmth from the range. A thick fog from the branch of the river ran along the valley but by ten it would be gone and the day would be warm, dry and clear. A slight breeze perhaps. Well up into the sixties, perhaps low seventies.

  He’d heard nothing from upstairs and wouldn’t be surprised if Jessica slept most of the day. He still wasn’t clear where she’d come from or how long she’d been on the road. He didn’t even know her last name.

  He went into the fog already backlit with the faintest of yellow glows and down to the Volkswagen and made a slow trip around the car. The inspection sticker was current, with seven months left. The tires were in bad shape but he already knew that from observing the tracks on the woods road the morning before. At the rear he eased down to kneel. The plates were current as well. He popped open the back, feeling this was not invasive but mechanical and his intent helpful. The little engine seemed in good enough shape, reasonably clean with cables and even the dinky heater tube was solid. Finally he lifted the dipstick but even that was better than it could be—the oil was perhaps half a quart low and thick and black as a skillet. So it wanted an oil change. Everything else looked good to go. He rocked back on his heels and quietly shut the compartment door and pressed until he heard it latch. Somebody had watched over this car and Jessica was the obvious caretaker.

  Hewitt’s own driving life ended a couple years after his breakup with Emily—those nigh mythic years of slow but determined destruction and absolute inability to see anything beyond his own flopping bruised heart. The final incident had been a winter afternoon when he’d been drinking since well before dawn the day before and without the least idea how he got there watched in bemused detachment as the old Volvo spun three accelerating circles on black ice up above Emmett Kirby’s, then at sharply defined greater speed went down the embankment to crash through the ice of Pearce Brook, shivering to a crunching grinding stop in the thick ice, boulders and frigid water, which while only two feet deep left Hewitt stranded with a broken femur, clavicle and cracked ribs. He sat placidly in the car and exchanged pleasantries with old Emmett who’d hitched down on his double canes to see what the Pearce boy was up to now, awaiting the official arrivals when the humor pretty much ended.

  For most of a year after the accident he’d taken a sliding membership of painkillers but quit them all at once when he was astonished to realize he was a junkie. During the bad first month he’d thought his body couldn’t function without the pills but he set a deadline to go clean for six months even if the pain was so acute as to throw him off everything else. He could take the time. Three months along he still gimped and ached but owned his brain again. He’d been stoned as a loon during the final DUI hearing when he was still on crutches. Halfway through these proceedings he knew which way it was going to go and dug his license from his old wallet and so when the judge asked if he had anything to say on his own behalf, he’d tugged down by the coatsleeve the old family attorney who would reiterate all the arguments from the past which Hewitt knew held no water and hobbled up to the bench and said to the judge, “You’ve been more than fair with me in the past. I expect you want this.” And laid the license down before the judge and turned and went back to his seat.

  Everything after that was a formality. Except the conversation with Walter right after that final accident, which had been shock enou
gh to take seriously. Of course it’d been easy to quit the death-by-whisky drinking when he’d been flying on unlimited Percocet. Walter was no fool and suggested Hewitt allow himself a couple of beers or wine if the occasion fit. Walter had said, “We all have something eats our ass. And nobody can tell another person when the time’s come to stop dancing in the dragon’s jaws. But you’ve gone past tragic to pathetic, Hewitt. I’m probably the only person who can tell you that. And I’m kinda sick of you just now.”

  HE WENT ALONG to the forge. He had no definite plan to work but didn’t discount the possibility either. He had to sit there a while to see if it was a day for iron or not. This was the essence of what his customers perceived as a great problem—the fact he refused to state a deadline however vague. The customer could bring the most precise drawings of what he wanted and the finished product would often not resemble the drawing at all. Until installation Hewitt would visit the job site only once—to make his own measurements regardless of the precision of those already handed to him. This was now his reputation and he grumpily knew it added rather than subtracted from the value of his work. On the door to the forge was a sign, hand painted in black block letters against a plain piece of plank. The legend ran:

  IF YOU WANT IT DONE YOUR WAY LEARN HOW TO DO IT

  & MAKE IT YOURSELF.

  YOUR COMMISSION IS NOT MY VISION.

  Beneath that in slightly larger letters:

  NO ENTRY WITHOUT PERMISSION.

  Gordy Peeks had built the rough shell of bricks and the hearth and chimney but Hewitt had finished the rest himself. The brick reached to shoulder height and above that were wooden walls and an open-raftered tin roof. The only windows were on the north side so sunlight never altered the precise reading of heat through color and therefore malleability of the metal. The floor was hardpack. A pair of anvils fastened with giant forged staples deep into chunks of upright log stood in the center of the floor along with a wooden tub of water for annealing. On the brick front of the forge pegs studded into the mortar held several dozen pairs of tongs. Behind him close to the anvils a workbench kept all the small tools within easy reach—the hardies and fullers and swages, holdfasts, chisels, punches, bicks and forks, rivet headers and nail headers and bolt headers, various plates and taps, clippers and shears, also somewhere close to twenty hammers each different in weight and size and function, files and rasps, calipers in diverse sizes and metal rules of varying length. The tools with wooden handles were a special joy, the wood so old and used the handles were smooth, almost soft in the hand, sweat-polished like wood butter.

  Along the wall was a second workbench of heavy two-inch hemlock planks on hardwood foundation posts cut from abandoned beams. On this bench was the long post vise with its leg that reached clear to the floor, beside that a smaller bench vise for lesser work, a hand-cranked post drill he preferred because he didn’t burn up bits that way, a bench grinder with a foot-powered treadle; wads of steel wool in a wooden lard box stained through now with linseed oil, a dozen or so metal brushes of various shapes and widths, some with brass bristles for finish work and others with steel for rougher work. A good-sized vat filled with motor oil he could soak heavily rusted iron in. Above the bench on the wall hung a calendar from Sanborn & Sons Harness Shop, two months out of date.

  In the far corner covered with a piece of canvas was the set of tanks and oxyacetylene torches, his welding helmet resting on top like a discarded fencing mask. The beauty of the acetylene weld was undeniable. And many of the finer steels he was forced to work with required it. It was almost impossible to find high-grade wrought iron anymore—now mostly steel or steel alloys. But Hewitt was known to junkdealers from Machiasport to Troy, from lower Quebec to the Berkshires. Almost all who would call him when they came across true iron stock, so he had an ample supply resting on chocks in the barn. He saved this for special projects, although he could never predict when a project would became special, requiring that fine metallurgy. And the variety and consistency of the modern steels were not without their own merit. He knew much of what he did, seen through other eyes, was an unnecessary pain in his ass. But he did what he had to do to live with the work.

  Resting against the double doors was his current project, a set of driveway gates for a summer home up in the Pomfret hills. When he took the job he told the owner not to construct the brick columns that were meant to hold the gates and meld them with the white board fencing. Because the gates would be too heavy to simply drill into mortar and he’d have to sink iron posts for anchors. Hewitt had leaned back against his own fencepost at this point and gone on to explain the gates he was building could not possibly be ready that fall. He advised the man to leave his driveway open for the winter—it would make it easier for the plow truck. Otherwise he could go to Agway and buy a cheap tube gate that should do the job.

  The more they came prepared to deal with his difficult approach to the work, the more difficult he became. Some days he thought he should just quit. But there wasn’t enough money to do that. And there was the huge question of filling his time. He’d boxed himself into a corner by making a sincere effort to do the opposite. His work was good but he wasn’t so proud to not realize that it was the focus he brought to it more than some special gift. Nobody paid attention anymore, was what he thought. Mostly he stayed to himself. He belonged to no association or guild and disliked nothing more than being cornered by another smith eager to talk technique. Because too many people confuse technique with vision. You get to a certain point and then you can do it or should quit. Although, as with all rules there was the exception—his long strange luscious friendship with a smith from northern Vermont, Julie Korplanski.

  He studied the gates resting against the north wall. Heavy rectangles outlined with great straps of four-inch stock were the frames of the gates. The rest interweaving hammered straps that left perfect ten-inch squares throughout the gate, the straps both horizontal and vertical not single but paired with one slightly wider than the other, the pairings reversed every other time, the way patterns reverse in a tartan. The ten-inch squares framed delicate inner circles of round stock. Inside these circles he planned something that so far eluded him. So the work waited as did the man in Pomfret, who probably wouldn’t arrive for the summer until Independence Day weekend. Hewitt would hear from him.