A Peculiar Grace (36 page)

He studied her a long moment. Then he said, “There’s certainly enough ugly to go around. Go on up in those woods, see if they’ll help. But just one thing, okay?”

“What?”

“You get cold or spooked or whatever come right back down quick—don’t wait long enough to know if you’re imagining things or not.”

“You think whoever it was—”

“I don’t think anything. Except a couple days or nights ago somebody tortured and killed an old man right up the road and nobody knows yet who it was or where they are. That’s all I know.”

She stood a bit. Then she said, “Maybe I should stay here. I just want out of the house. Space around me. I want to look at the stars.”

Briefly, he was brilliant. “Sleep in the orchard. Go up above the barn and find a nice soft bed of clover and sleep amongst those old trees. That’s a fine place. Peaceful and lovely as can be.”

H
EWITT WASN’T HUNGRY
but he sat at the kitchen table and drank a beer. Here’s to you Emmett. Half a century ago Emmett had been spreading manure when the apron chain on the spreader jammed and he’d whoa’d up his team and climbed back in the body to try and work it free and somehow got his foot caught under a spacer, crying out as he slipped on the slick boards, inadvertently signaling the team which simply stepped up to the job and went on to the end of the field, made their turn on the headland and headed back down while Emmett was pulled through the whirling rows of teeth and beaters and dumped on the ground like an empty sack—cut and bruised, with a broken leg and arm as well as a punctured lung and damaged kidney and large intestine and three vertebrae crushed in his back. His wife had found him when she saw the team standing in the dooryard when she went looking for him for noon dinner. She’d died before him and Emmett survived—a crooked gentle old man.

Hewitt moved to the living room, thinking he might play some music as part of this private memorial. But in all the years all the times he’d been in that old farmhouse he’d never once heard a radio on, never so much as glimpsed even the oldest of gramophones. Perhaps Emmett was one of the last where music meant singing the old songs and hymns learned at home. So he instead sat silent in the dark. As the old man must’ve so many nights, the long winter nights especially. With one or more of the dozen house cats up in his lap. The cats had moved from the barn to the house after his wife died.

He wondered why Emmett had not recognized the maniac intent of his attacker and given up the goods more easily. To not put himself through what so clearly was going to be a long and agonizing death, undoubtedly aware from the beginning there was no way free of this particular mess. And then Hewitt knew. That toughness, that holding-out had nothing to do with the attack, the pain, the ever more certain death. And this translated into scorn for the punk, the shit, who was trying to inform an old man his body was capable of sustaining great pain. Hewitt knew Emmett would spit at the thought of anyone trying to use the obvious against him.

He could see in his mind’s eye the old man in his kitchen and his wormy hands gripping the frayed edges of his chair, and wondered what would become of the cats. And resolved to inquire and try to bring home at least one or maybe a pair. For Emmett. For himself. The barn cat was wobbling and ancient and there was a fair chance that a new cat on the place would be the end of him but perhaps not—cats were uncanny in determining territory. And Hewitt liked the idea of having a living extension of Emmett alongside him.

H
E WENT TO
bed a little after ten. He briefly stood at his window looking out over the farm in the pale moonlight. He could see the orchard, the faint illuminated lump of a girl in an old duck sleeping bag.

At two he woke and gazing out the window, was wondering what sort of night she might be having, how disturbed, how cold and wet with dew, how long she would lie awake studying the great dreaming limbs of the apples over her, her tent against the night sky.

At five o’clock he woke from a deep dreamless sleep to find her curled in her damp bag on the oval rug beside his bed. He lay studying her and then ever so quietly slipped out the other side of the bed and made his way downstairs.

T
HAT EVENING HE
dressed and after a small argument she drove him into Bethel to Chris Maxham’s for the calling hours. He tried his best to convince her to come in with him, arguing it could dispel any lingering doubts about her.

“I’ll wait with the car,” she said. “I don’t know any of those people and I don’t want em peering at me while they should be attending to the business at hand. Which is gathering for your friend, right?”

In the end she showered and changed into her dress and boots although she made a stop in Lympus on the way and bought a pack of cigarettes. So she could have something to do while she was waiting for him.

The next morning he was getting dressed once again, this time planning to catch a ride with Walter to the service at the Lympus Congregational Church. His face was red from shaving twice in twelve hours. Jessica was not coming. The night before had been fine but she felt each and every person who went into or out of the funeral home cast long eyes toward where she leaned against her car, smoking. Which Hewitt, while assuring her it had been her imagination, was certain was true.

So she was staying at the house. Hewitt was back in his suit, his jaw raw and his throat constricted by his tie, waiting for Walter. When she came into the kitchen in his old sweatpants and a couple of layers of shirts although barefoot, waving her cheap revolver at him. It made
him jump and a swift mirth passed over her face. Then she said, “All right, asshole. Where’s my goddamn shells?”

For a moment he didn’t know what she was talking about.

“Hello? The clip? Where’s the fucking clip goes in this gun?”

“What do you want that for?”

She looked at him and tilted her head and tapped the end of the pistol barrel against the side of her head as if to determine if her skull was hollow or held a brain. Then said, “Because I don’t want to be stuck here alone without it.”

Hewitt did his best to breathe deep without appearing to do so. He understood. A man-killer was still somewhere. On the other hand she knew, at best, maybe two dozen people she might recognize on sight. He didn’t want to come back from the funeral and find a clueless client belly-up in his front yard. After what seemed a very long time he walked to the shelf above the stove and handed her the clip. He wanted to give her advice but it was too complicated and he wasn’t sure where to begin. And then the Thunderbird rolled into the yard.

So he said, “There’s my ride. It’ll be two three hours, maybe a little more. And do me a favor. Stick that gun down in your pants under your shirt where you can get to it if you need to but don’t shoot any police and also if anybody else does show up, you start by assuming they’re just here to see me. Okay?”

“Hewitt. Don’t ever fuck with my gun again, you hear? I’ve had it for years and if I need it I want it all there. So okay your own self.”

T
HREE DAYS LATER
a twenty-three-year-old boy and his sixteen-year-old girlfriend were found in a cheap motel in White River. The boy was dead, the girl unconscious. The motel owner grew uneasy because only one night had been paid for but the maid reported a
DO NOT DISTURB
sign dangling on the door. The room was strewn with empty prescription bottles. The dead boy had deep lacerations in his hands, some still embedded with wood splinters. The girl was taken
to Dartmouth-Hitchcock where she remained in the intensive care unit. The boy had a police record dating back to junior high and was on probation at the time. The girl was clean, although no one had reported her missing. No family members of either were available for comment.

T
HE DROUGHT HELD
, relieved by two afternoons with billowing clouds of empty promise that delivered short runoff downpours—enough to keep people mowing their lawns and that was about it. Then it was just too hot to work. “Too hot to fuck,” is what Roger Bolton said when he stopped by with a pair of young males, a red tiger and a black tiger, the ones Hewitt had requested from Emmett’s pride. Roger said the others had found homes the same way, word going out and people taking them on. The cats only knew Emmett and were terrified, backed into the wooden chicken crate and hissing as hands approached the lid. Hewitt knew he couldn’t let them live in the barn—they were house cats and the old tom in the barn would fight them into leaving. He and Jessica closed off some of the downstairs so the cats had the kitchen and pantry and living room and that was all. For the time being. They’d get used to the people and the space and slowly be allowed more of the house.

Jessica said, “What’re their names?”

“I don’t have any idea. Hell, he had a dozen or fifteen. I never knew which he was talking to, most of the time.”

“We need to name em then.”

“How bout that’s your job.”

“That’s easy. My grandmother always had tabby cats—”

“What’s a tabby cat? These are tigers.”

She frowned at him. “Whatever. The point is, during the time I knew her best she had a pair just about like this. Red and black. The red cat was named Rufus and the dark one Tom—original, I know, but that’s what she called em. And they were her best company. So, if it’s all right with you.”

“Yup. That sounds fine. Are you taking em over or are we going to share?”

“You don’t know much about cats, do you Hewitt?”

“I always thought I knew all I needed too.”

“Well, you don’t. We don’t share. They’re the ones do the picking.”

T
HEY SPENT AN
afternoon at the big swimming hole on the White River near Stockbridge but there were too many people. So they enlisted Walter and left his jeep in Sharon and rented tubes and floated one long afternoon of riverdream, their faces, shoulders and knees being burnt deep and painful except for Walter who wore sunscreen as a mask, his dark eyes and hair glistening within the thick layer. Jessica told him he looked like a woman at a spa but Walter just raised one smeared eyebrow and said, “I’ve been burned before.”

Roger hired Jessica again, this time for a longer job, helping to tear down a nearly collapsed immense dairy barn up in Chelsea. He’d pick her up in the gray dawn and often it would be close to dusk when he dropped her off again. It wasn’t as nasty as the first job but offered challenges she accepted as if she were going back to school. The third day on the job she arrived home outfitted with a first quality leather toolbelt, complete with a tape measure, a cat’s paw pry bar and a solid Estwing hammer. And a decent pair of steel-shanked work boots. The barn was a wealth of material. Old long boards a foot and a half wide, planks in the same dimensions but three and some few four inches thick. And the structural beams. She sat over dinner one evening and described to Hewitt the ten-by-ten beams found, each cut from a single tree. Thirty-eight feet long. She liked the work. She found she was without fear and could scamper along a hayloft beam thirty feet above the ground to pry loose the three old spikes holding a much more recent support pole. She was awed by the fact that the entire frame was held together with wooden pegs, trunnels, and explained needlessly
to a silent Hewitt that the word came from jamming together the old words tree nails. Which, she said, after all is what such a massive peg is.

Twice during this time she did not come home until very late. She’d gone out with the guys to the Switching Crew, a bar in Royalton that long ago had been a freight and passenger depot. This information volunteered in the early morning as she was making a sandwich for her lunch, ready for Roger. It was all she said but it was clear to Hewitt one of the young men who worked for Roger was involved. Well, he thought, watching her big-booted stride down the drive toward the road, lunch sack in hand, toolbelt low on her hips, pulled down on her right side by the weight of the hammer, that was probably a good thing.

He refused, even secretly, to take responsibility for how she was getting along. Partly because her accounts of her past, splintered as they were, suggested she’d coped well for lengthy periods before. And partly because he suspected that the sheer drive of the physical work might be slopping water over whatever snippets of fire nipped at her heels.

And so they went along.

T
HEY RETAMED THE
two young cats quickly. Jessica knew to leave them be at first except for strategic tins of sardines and tuna—forbidding Hewitt to buy canned cat food, only dry mix, using the treats to draw them forth. Within days Rufus and Tom had begun to test their new home, the new people, darting from furniture, a rolling ball of tussle in the corner of the living room. Quickly enough they seemed to have forgotten what they had witnessed or more likely in the way of cats were content in the here and now. In any event, each would lie sprawled on a lap and bat with their paws at hands and, if ignored, would rise and slide up a torso to rub their fine delicate skulls against the sides of their person’s face. And, as Jessica had known, as if through some hidden lottery Tom clearly preferred her
company and Rufus liked both equally, often ending up on Hewitt’s lap by default.

H
E HAD WORK
to do. A fireplace screen but the fireplace was a giant from the earliest, oldest house all the way to Plymouth, five feet tall and eight feet long. A rare survivor from when it was both furnace and cooking facility and all the house could boast. A pair of hitching posts for a horse farm in Strafford, with the exact height from bare ground scribbled on an index card, the rest of the design up to him—the sort of job he loved. All in all he was doing well and the winter was already as full as he usually wanted. But this year he was curious to see what he could actually produce. To be a full-time working smith. To see how it felt. He’d never done it. In the early years because he wasn’t ready, then because he didn’t care and finally because he gained the mastery to easily say no. But now he was after something new.

T
HE EVENINGS
J
ESSICA
got home early they would now sit up in the garden as the heat of the day drained and drink a beer before going down to the house for supper. The days were hot and dry but the sun was dropping earlier each evening. August was approaching. He received an invitation to Nort and Amber Snow’s annual summer party, held in early August because too many people went away to their camps toward the end of the month for summer’s last pause and also, although not everyone knew it, because Norton’s birthday fell somewhere in there, the exact date never revealed. It was a party for the town and not for himself, an impulse Hewitt understood and respected. The invitation read
To Hewitt and Friend
. Which didn’t surprise Hewitt, in fact pissed him off a little bit because if Amber didn’t already know there were easily a half-dozen people she could’ve asked who knew Jessica as Jessica. Then he calmed, thinking this might be Amber’s idea of tact, worrying that
Hewitt and Jessica
might suggest
what she was unsure of. What in fact Hewitt guessed with the exception of Walter most everyone was wondering. He’d spread enough information so the tittle-tattle tongues had some information to work with. There would be at least a couple of women at the party who catching Jessica alone would be direct in their interrogation. And she was reluctant enough about going as it was.