A Peculiar Grace (30 page)

She had a hand up on the rear tire of the tractor, tucked under the fender but he knew it was there. It was a strangely intimate thing to do. So he waited. Her face was turned up and she said, “She’s a woman, Hewitt. Not a goddamn memory.”

His finger relaxed against the button. And reached out and ran his hand over the top of her head, stroking her hair. She let him, both knowing this was new and harmless and long ago and never lost. Then she stepped out from his hand. She nodded her head as if the conversation was concluded. Which he thought it was. So he ratcheted up the gas and pressed the ignition. The tractor barked and spat oily clouds before it settled into a strong mile-eating tempo.

He looked back down at Amber. She was beside the tractor still, her mouth open and moving with unheard words. He backed off the gas and cried, “What?”

And she stepped up on the narrow running board and cupped a hand to his ear and said, “One thing Hewitt. You got to get rid of that little weird girlfriend everybody’s talking about.”

Hewitt blinked. Her deep brown and yellow eyes were inches from his. If he’d wanted he could’ve kissed her before she knew what he was doing. Instead he said, “She’s not my girlfriend. And fuck what
everybody’s talking about.” And he put the tractor in reverse and slowly let out the clutch and they were moving. For a moment Amber grasped his shoulders, to steady herself as she bent close and called above the noise, “Don’t forget our party,” and he grinned up at her before she jumped down.

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” he called, slid the tractor into second and lurched forward.

Six

He finished the gates the week after the solstice, including latch and mounting hardware and the brute gateposts, fifteen-foot sections of railroad track to sink into the ground and hold the gates, each of which weighed several hundred pounds. Once up they would swing open as if floating and allow themselves to be pulled closed as if the motion were embedded in the gates.

During this same time Walter and Jessica worked together to paint her car. This involved not just the two coats of primer and the four of paint, but also vigorous buffing of chrome, even the strips along the vent windows, scrubbing the upholstery and roof fabric, then numerous coats of hard wax on the exterior and saddlesoaping and polishing the interior.

Hewitt and Jessica had been eating breakfast the morning after his visit with Amber when Walter pulled in, not in the Bird but with his red jeep, backing around to the front bumper of the Volkswagen. Hewitt asked Jessica to wait in the house. As he was going out the door she said, “He clobbers you again you want I should call the police or just come out and shoot him?”

Hewitt walked barefoot across the yard. Walter was unwinding the winch mounted on the rear of the jeep.

Hewitt said, “Seems it’d be easier to do it in the shed rather than have her walk back and forth to your place, or you running her each way.”

“I can’t imagine you’ve got much interest in having me in your line of vision all day long.”

“A kicked dog’ll shy off, unless he’s been caught in the garbage.”

Walter sat back on his haunches and tipped his sunglasses up on to his head. “What do you know about dogs?”

“Well, hell, I’m not ten.”

Walter eased up on to his feet in a sinuous smooth motion and leaned against the jeep, his hands folded in front of him. “I’m godawful pissed at myself. I made a promise a long time ago to never again hurt a living being.”

Hewitt waited a moment and said, “Sometimes maybe a person has to break one of those promises to make sure they still count.”

Walter studied him. Then he said, “That’s a generous way of looking at it.”

“Hey, bro. I was talking about myself.”

“Is that so?”

“That’s so.”

Walter nodded a couple of times and then said, “I still want to apologize.”

“I druther you not.”

Walter looked off up the hill and said, “We’re square, then?”

“I already forgot what we were talking about.”

Walter nodded again and looked back at Hewitt. He stuck out his hand and they power-shook, locked thumbs with fingers over the backs of each other’s hand.

Hewitt said, “Ask you something?”

“Sure, man.”

“Jessica said you’re writing a book of some sort. That right?”

“It’s something.”

Hewitt nodded. Then he said, “Is it about all those things you told me you can’t talk about?”

Walter reared back his head. His sunglasses slipped and landed halfway down his nose. He reached up and adjusted them and said,
“No. Those are things can’t be told. That was most of why Pam left. She wanted me to talk things out. She thought that’s what I needed. But those are stories that are so strangely fucking true they become lies the moment you open your mouth.” He paused and grinned and said, “She always thought that was bullshit. But it’s not just me. You ride over to the VA with me someday, or down to the Legion. It’s all the same. Not just the boys from the Nam either. The Korean and WW Two vets—they’d say the same thing. Oh they can tell you, so can I, where I was and when and all that shit that doesn’t mean a thing. But the stories? What happened? Nobody can tell you that.”

Hewitt said, “Because you can’t understand it unless you’ve been through it.”

“No,” Walter said. “Because you can’t understand it afterward. All it is, is what it was while it was going on, and no man can explain that. There idn’t but one or two that’ve come close. Now, we going to stand around jabbering all day or is there work to be got done?”

Hewitt nodded. He said, “You going to tell me what your book’s about?”

Walter said, “No.”

T
HE LAST DAY
Walter showed up late with a bucket of chicken and box of fried whole clams picked up at the Onion Flats take-out window and two bottles of wine. All three climbed into the orchard to sit and feast. For a person who did not eat meat, Jessica was wolfish. She preferred drumsticks and thighs, which would’ve been a problem since they were Hewitt’s favorite also but he convinced her to try a clam. After that it was a giddy free-for-all, hands and faces grease painted, shining in the slanting sunlight. The wine was good. Much better than what Walter usually would spend money on. But it was a celebration and Hewitt understood for far more than the two big jobs completed on the same day.

Jessica, a mouth full of clams and grimy wineglass in hand, said, “You two are corrupting me.”

“You betcher ass,” Walter said. “I never seen a person more in need of a little honest corruption than you. And you’re doing fine. Like a duck to water.”

“You know how these chickens are raised?” She waved a stripped drumstick like a baton, indicating the world beyond their view.

“A course I do. But you start ticking off all that’s wrong with this day and age and so on and so forth and you’ll die before your list is half done.” He paused and then said, “Sometimes, a chicken leg is just a chicken leg. How many of those are left anyhow?”

“I don’t know. I’m gonna concentrate on these clams.”

“All filled up with pollution of all sorts. Bad shit. Clams are dug from the mudflats at low tide. Where all the chemicals and God knows what else have been piling up and settling for centuries.”

“Will you shut up? I was having a good time.”

“You still are, little sister. You still are.”

“Pass me a fill-up of that wine,” she said.

Hewitt already full, lying on his back listening. It was a fine evening. The sun was swelling into soft diffusion above them, those last long rays running down over them. The ground emitting the heat of the day. The apple trees over him.

M
ORE THAN ONCE
Hewitt woke in the night to pee and from the top of the stairs saw the light on below and knew she was in with his father’s paintings. He was curious which of those works she might like more than others but had not yet found the moment to talk with her about them. Part of this was his schedule and part was wanting to leave her privacy. It had taken Hewitt himself years and years to comprehend those paintings and while this was partly because of his particular link to them, he knew they exerted some version of that force upon others. So he waited. And in the waiting he found some new level of fondness for her—that his father’s work would infect and compel her as it so clearly did.

* * *

T
HE DAY AFTER
the picnic in the orchard they moved the gates to Pomfret. It was a procession—the Volkswagen like a vision on the back roads over the hills, Walter with his jeep, the back filled with the rail-track posts and tools for digging the postholes, and leading them all the small U-Haul holding the wrapped gates and because it was a Sunday, Roger Bolton at the wheel and Hewitt in the passenger seat, his head out the window, straining to hear any disturbance in the back and flicking his head around to urge Roger to slow down. It could take most of the day to auger the postholes and set the posts and then mount the gates. At this point it came down less to mastery than luck. Measure and measure and measure again but still until the whole thing was in and up and working smooth as sleet on snow there was no way to control the process. A boulder two feet down could change the entire procedure. The owner, who lived most of the year in Katonah, a surgeon of obscure and expensive procedures, was not yet there. Hewitt loved the idea of the man arriving in ten days and finding the gates up and waiting. And it would happen. With either a morning or a long day of work ahead of them all.

First Hewitt measured the exact distance for the gatepost holes, using a chalkline to snap a triangle on the ground, the bottom straight between the two holes and the two peak lines of the diagram going off at angles to meet precisely in the center of the driveway a dozen feet up the drive.

They got lucky. Roger had a four-foot gas powered fence post auger and with Hewitt hovering dropped the point exactly on the blue chalk cross and the auger sank into the ground, spewing soil dark and loamy. Then a hard hour with manual posthole diggers, one man on his belly to guide and another upright to work the handles. The steel track needed to be eight feet in the ground to support the gates, to hold steady through the deepest winter frost. It was hard work and nailbiting—the deeper they went the more likely to strike the buried boulder or glacial bedrock. But luck held and soon they were inserting
the posts, Hewitt again dancing with a chalkline and a pair of five-foot construction levels as ever so slowly they filled and tamped the poles. It didn’t matter to Hewitt that the sections of post above ground would be blocked in with columns of brick and mortar: he wasn’t doing that part of the job so had only his own work to count on to keep those ties forever straight and upright. Then it was simply a matter of bolting the gate hinge hardware on to the ties and finally lifting each gate and aligning the three female ends of the hinge assembly above the male uprights and sliding them down into place.

With both gates on and wide open Hewitt stepped back a moment to take them in. The others were leaning against the U-Haul. After a long pause he gave the right-hand gate a light shove and it swung graceful and slow and paused just off the chalkline. Then the other and it responded the same way. The gates were within an inch of meeting freely on their own. Considering their weight and size this was more than acceptable—it was perfect. He stepped to where they met and aligned them, for the first time actually feeling the exquisite floating balance of them, paused again a moment with one hand on each gate before reaching and dropping the latch from the right side into the left.

He turned and said, “Thanks, guys. Let’s get out of here.”

Hewitt walked around the Volkswagen and got in the passenger side. The interior of the car was as staggering as the paint job. It could’ve been forty years ago. Even the sunlight cracks on the dashboard had been filled and smoothed and so were lost, gone now. For Hewitt it was a fine moment, the apex of two large jobs met and done.

Jessica got in and said, “They’re fucking gorgeous Hewitt.”

“Hush,” he said, a voice too mild to take offense from. Then he said, “I’d like to show you something? You up for it?”

She paused and looked over at him. The pause went on, long enough so he knew she’d had some plan of her own.

At last she said, “Yeah, show me something, Hewitt.”

It was fine to be driving the dirt roads out of Pomfret in the little car that seemed made for this prime summer day, traveling under
the dappled canopies of roadside trees, both taking in while pretending not to notice the swiveling necks within other cars they passed. The first thing he did was direct her high into the hills and had her stop the car before the roadside marker, an ancient stone post driven deep and with faint letters still clear enough to be read that designated this almost lost road through the woods as the King’s Highway, the date obliterated. Mounted lower on the flat face of the stone was a small brass disc clearly dated 1882 which simply read
THE FIRST THOROUGHFARE IN CENTRAL VERMONT EST
. 1764. The center of the disc had a profile of a man in a wig with smaller letters
GEORGE III
and at the bottom of the disc in larger letters the initials
D.A.R
.

Hewitt said, “Idn’t that something?

Jessica was quiet and then said, “Damn. This road. It’s older than the country itself.”

“That’s right.”

She was quiet a long moment and then said, “You got to wonder. Did those Vikings built that chamber at your place, and the others you spoke of—maybe they hiked through here too.”

“Could be.”

Again she was quiet and then said, “In Mississippi, there’s speculation those old Spaniards wandered through. They found pieces of metal, swords and bits of armor and stuff like that. And there’s the big Indian Mounds. Some really big ones in the Delta. People say it wasn’t just little tribes stuck off in the woods here and there but a whole deal going on. Cities and all that. It makes you wonder how much what we think we know is true and how much just convenience. Know what I mean?”

Hewitt looked at her, her serious absorbed face. He said, “Well, for the moment at least we’re the ones in charge. So we get to pick and choose. And we choose that history begins with us.”