A Peculiar Grace (25 page)

He never could remember when exactly he placed the box and shirt on the fire.

Now, rain washing down, he lay in bed and remembered how for weeks after he’d raged within, having lost the central memory of a grand ceremonial.

And was close to laughing over this suddenly explicit nonevent when he caught himself. Remembering those long wonderful winter childhood evenings with his mother and Beth and his father gathered around the fireplace, both children assuming their father was absorbed in the beauty of the fire as they were. When certainly many nights that man was watching something else altogether.

He took up once more the photograph. He resolved at some vague point in the future he owed her at least a letter. It would be a long one. Or a simple paragraph. He’d know when the time was right.

I
N THE KITCHEN
was the most wonderful gift—a fresh pot of coffee all set up and ready to go. He peered out the window. The
Thunderbird was gone but Walter’s old rust and red jeep was in its place. On the table a note—
Welcome home. We’ve gone to the auto parts store for paint and some other shit we need for the Bug. Thanks for pushing it under cover, neither one of us guessed it was going to rain. Be back early afternoon. Love Jessica. PS I think your friend Julie is pissed off at you
.

So he stood with a hot mug over the answering machine, the number 3 blinking steadily. He sipped and took a deep breath and pressed play.

“Mr. Pearce this is Jim Ralston returning your call—” Hewitt deleted this, having no desire to hear condolences for anyone, real or imagined.

“Hewitt, it’s Julie. Don’t ever call me from a bar late at night. There’s nothing more pathetic than a drunk asking to get married and thanks to you I was up most of the night assuring my
dear loving partner
that you and I are only old friends who spend time talking shop every now and then. You sounded really fucked-up. I thought you were pretty much over that. When the time comes I’ll give you a buzz or stop in when I get down that way. Bye.”

The third call was a hang-up. But in his own way, Hewitt had learned how to patch the off-day and off-time announcements of the machine to the day and time he lived within. So he knew that long silence and the dead buzz of dial tone had been recorded the night before. Probably about the time he was vomiting pizza.

But what was working most foul was the message from Julie. Julie Korplanski. He didn’t even want to recall the night in the bar and could not for his life recollect what his message had been. One more fuckup in a long fucked-up couple of days. Ah Julie. Ten years younger then Hewitt so when they first met he was cast in the role of teacher. She was cautious enough at first to keep their focus on pounding metal. Even as they rounded out very quickly to long evenings eating and drinking and sweaty sex that left the bed a mess and both of them curled tight together in delightful sleep. Driving down from Hardwick to spend an afternoon in the forge and then the
evening with a good dinner before repairing to bed. Where mighty repair was made. He’d made the drive to Hardwick a few times and loved the pretty spot where she’d built a small passive solar house and a somewhat larger forge and workshop. She needed more work space than Hewitt because she’d settled into a never-ending exploration of the equine form. Which was where she eclipsed him. And he knew it and was proud of her. Her horses were crafted from any and all types of metal but despite the methods of assemblage one could walk around and around one of her horses and see nothing but horse.

Julie did not own a horse and was secretly terrified of them. Which would not stop her from spending hours and days at the neighboring farm in Hardwick studying the big Shire horses kept there. She could watch one for twenty minutes or four days and all the sudden know what she had to do at home. Once she spotted how her hands would translate what she saw she would not go back. Until the next time.

She laughed when her work was reviewed finally in
Artforum
and despite the praise the writer felt the need to point out that her horses seemed to emerge from some giant unknown breed. Even her curled foals loomed.

But came the winter day they spent in bed and her long hard thigh was pinning his legs to the bed as she rolled over to press against his chest and look into his face and inform him she had a new lover. One who was living with her and one she planned to spend the rest of her life with.

Hewitt lay silent beneath her, this lovely strong woman gazing into his eyes waiting for the first blink from him and he knew he had to lose her and knew it was perhaps the central error of his adult life. But it had to be. And he’d not moved except to reach a hand and take a handful of her thick brown hair and told her he was happy for her. At which she reared back and slapped him hard across the face.

She was out of bed dressing. He lay watching her and then said, “I do love you, you know. But that’s not enough, is it?”

Buttoning her shirt over her firm brown breasts, she studied him an uncomfortable amount of time and then said, “We’ll still get together now and then.”

Then she was dressed and came swiftly to the bedside and kissed him lightly and he lay in the bed listening to her go down the stairs and out of the house. Heard her truck start and back around and then leave. And he lay in bed, thinking That’s the end of that. An hour later he was wandering the house in his sweatpants and flannel robe, wondering what he’d missed. And relieved at the same time. Whatever unspoken thing she’d wanted from him had been resolved.

Three hours later he was outside in a drifting sweep of snow, dark now but the snow settled over him and flitted his face with cold gone kisses. His head tilted back to let that snow strike his face and mouth. Knowing he’d lost something once again.

It was three months before she called him. Two hours later they were in bed, a bottle of wine uncorked and glasses still filled on the bedside table. She talked briefly about her Charlie but fucked Hewitt slowly sweetly that afternoon. He was asleep when she woke him, dressed, leaning over the bed. She kissed him and told him she’d see him. He said, “This is really goodbye. Right?”

She’d said, “No baby. This is what you get from me. I happen to like it. Nobody owns me Hewitt. Except me. You should wish as much for yourself.”

H
EWITT WAS IN
the forge with the rain overhead on the roof steady in soft counterpoint to the hammerwork. He was turning the second of the fist-size eggs that would top the gate, after deciding to fashion all four from the forge so he might compare the rough eggs to bring them to aligned size. And only then finish them. It made sense—if the four matched in rough form then the goal in finish work would be merely to bring them to indistinguishable dull-gleaming texture. Not an original idea but one articulated by Timothy Farrell and, much later Hewitt realized by his own father—build up the basic structure in
however many forms it would end up taking on and then, therefore, the conclusion became not a matter of chance but of careful eye. So he heated and beat slowly the compression of the rod first to round, then onion head, the ball beginning to stretch and elongate as the ovoid took shape. Stopping to eyeball the iron egg in the pritchel hole of the smaller anvil and go back to work. Hewitt had time to consider the process. In fact his brain was a flooded stream that the work pulled by demand into one long braided rivulet.

He paused work and considered the bottle of whisky from the night before. Now holding what seemed a good deal more than it had when he’d gone to bed. The long abstinence was worthless against the events of the past three days even if the booze played roles in his screwup phone call to Julie and certainly hungover not on sharpest tacks with Emily but all that was done and so he walked over and unscrewed the cap and took the smallest sip. It was good and he took another and felt the soft flush up his arms and left the bottle open on the workbench and went back to work, thinking of the wonder of the egg.

E
MILY WAS GOING
to come for the Thanksgiving after his father died but canceled because of a bad bout of flu, leaving Hewitt and his mother alone to celebrate the holiday that was Thomas Pearce’s least favorite, a day he described as one of too much brown food consumed to the point of a stupor, a vivid symbol of what he considered wrong with the country although he and Hewitt had argued over this the year before, Hewitt maintaining it was a matter of how much one put on one’s plate compared to the rampant corporate rape of the world’s natural resources, causing Thomas to respond acerbically that symbolism can be more potent than a sheaf of facts. That had also been Beth’s final Thanksgiving, starting as she did the next year her not-so-slow climb in the resort industry, an ambition that was neatly and pointedly avoided during conversation. But a year later Hewitt and Mary Margaret ate a pair of Cornish game hens in near silence while a cold rain muffled the gunshots of deer hunters up and down the
ridgelines. The meal was not a reflection upon the previous year but a bow to practicality and left them both quietly maudlin, a sadness within the house marked by Mary Margaret’s taking an afternoon nap, something she almost never did and certainly not the result of overeating. Leaving Hewitt to slump in the living room, missing his father and missing Emily and working himself into a full-chested knot of loneliness, sorrow and a touch of self-pity, waiting for the clock to edge toward five and the appointed time to call his love.

Who still did not sound well but had news that cheered Hewitt greatly: her parents had agreed that if Hewitt were to come for Christmas he might bring Emily home the day after for the week until the New Year—they didn’t want her driving herself in winter, a notion she sniffed off but Hewitt was happy he’d be with her for Christmas. Emily passed along her mother’s invitation for Hewitt to bring along Mary Margaret, which Hewitt knew would never happen but made clear to Emily how touched he was by the inclusion and then was off and running with his plans to show her Vermont in the winter—moonlight snow-shoeing and daytimes they’d go over the hills to Killington and he’d teach her to downhill ski, something she’d never done but he’d taken advantage of ski club in school as a way to get out of school Friday afternoons throughout the winters starting in second grade. She was hesitant but he was exuberant, insisting she’d be a natural at it, delighted at the idea of the two of them burning down the slopes when she interrupted and said, “Hewitt, I don’t feel so hot, okay? I’ve got to go.”

He drove out alone two days before Christmas, the backseat of the Volvo packed with modest gifts. A recurring erection due to the exultant expectation of having her in his eyes again, being able to touch her hand, hear her voice. To touch the skin, the soft invisible down along her arms, to feel the strong lock of the muscles of her back as she held him, the curve of her buttocks beneath his hands. Oh dark snow skies he wanted to slide into her as much as he wanted the rest of her but was prepared to wait, to be patient. To bring her back to Vermont.

Christmas Eve afternoon they rode together out to the Farrells’ where Hewitt was, as intended, a surprise, with his gifts of maple syrup and cheddar cheese and cob-smoked bacon, feeling a little foolish over the corny tourist gifts which however were met with a delight that clearly extended beyond the gifts themselves and they spent a pleasant afternoon sipping wild foxgrape wine in tiny crystal glasses and mostly talking shop and plans for the following summer. Emily in rabbit-lined boots and high wool socks with a deep green velvet skirt, white blouse and paler green vest rocking in her chair and with a keen flush as she watched Hewitt with the old couple and Timothy.

Driving back to her house for what he already knew would be an elaborate dinner he asked if she wanted to get stoned and she did, and then he asked if perhaps later, after the dinner, there might be a party out at the Ark or someplace and she’d turned and said, “I’m sure there is but we stay home tonight.”

He slept down the hall from her, sharing a bedroom with her next-to-oldest brother Hal, although he’d had a brief moment of hope at the end of the evening when she offered to do the last barn check but Elsa insisted on going with them. Once in the warm barn with its muted lights and rustle of cattle sleeping or chewing cud in their stanchions they were finally able to kiss the way they wanted to and even with Elsa playing with the barn cats and not missing a single move on their parts also able to confirm, Hewitt knew for both of them, their desire and intent for each other was intact and bold as ever. Her tongue in his mouth a hot bolt to startle and enchant his heart.

Next morning he gave her the Peruvian alpaca sweater and admired the small jade elephant on a fine gold hoop to replace the turquoise and silver stud he’d worn for two years and she’d leaned close and whispered Elephants never forget. The rest of the day was a blur of food and longing, a feast of wild geese and pheasant the Soren men had shot that fall and while Hewitt at the time was disdainful of hunters he kept quiet and was rewarded with Emily’s hand on his thigh beneath the drape of the tablecloth.

The next morning was bright and clear and there was no mistaking her meaning when Ellen Soren took Hewitt’s arm as they were packing the car and, her eyes squinted tight, ordered him to drive carefully.

Heading east, the thruway clear of snow or ice, the traffic light, Hewitt with growing excitement was outlining his plans for skiing and snowshoeing, this time in greater detail and with some helpful preparatory information included when Emily said, “Hewitt, I’m not going to be doing much of that.”

“Why?” He was thinking about rolling a joint, having Emily roll a joint, certain he could talk her out of her fears or uncertainties and also thinking ahead; his mother who slept alone in the big bedroom at the top of the stairs hadn’t bothered to make up a guest bed, knowing better.

“Because ten days ago I got everything set up so no one would know and Barb drove me to Syracuse. Hewitt, I had an abortion.”

“What?” He looked over at her and she looked back at him.