A Peculiar Grace (13 page)

He shut off the lights and stood a moment. There was more light now in those northern windows. He went up the stairs and out into the evening. The softening glow gone from the sun but not the land. And within this came floating down the crisp sweet smell of the new-cut hay.

The house was dark. And he looked but already knew that Jessica was not back, the Volkswagen nowhere in sight.

Twenty feet on toward the house he stopped. He paused and tipped back his head and studied the big elm behind the house, a risen thin-leafed crown. One of the last elms. So isolated as to almost be safe. He could draw a metaphor from that but decided against it. Thrust his hands deep into his jeans and rocked foot to foot. Trying to discern if it was true insight or simply an easy solution. Finally there was only one way to find out.

He went back to the smithy and nursed the hand crank until orange appeared deep in the coals and pumped the foot bellows twice and sat back to wait. The fire came up fast, deep and hot. Good bituminous coal holds a fire. He did not need to measure a thing but took up one of the circles and placed it into the fire and pumped again the bellows and waited. When the metal was past orange but not quite cherry he lifted it quickly with tongs and held it upright on the anvil
and beat the circle into an oval. He turned and tapped and reheated and tapped again and then cooled it in the brine. Lifted it and laid it atop the fire long enough to only warm and rubbed it down with a cloth crimped and dried with linseed oil and the oil went onto the warm surface and the cloth softened under his hand as he stood polishing. Then left the oval on top of the bench without even trying it against the gate.

He shut things down again and went out into full dark. He’d walked this so many times it didn’t matter there was no light in the house. But in the dark he looked once again, already knowing the answer. Her car was not in the yard anywhere and was not in the cavern of the shed. So he went on. He was hungry.

Jessica would have to take care of herself. Which she’d done before. Without thinking too much about it, he hoped she was doing that now.

And on the bench in the smithy behind him was an oval. Which would not fit, he knew, but was the right idea. Two rows of ovals across the gates. Tips up, bellies down. The round stock would be flattened slightly, smoothly, all the way round. So the eggs would blend with the whole but retain the essential quality of an egg. Which was an unblemished thing.

The rows of eggs would make the gate complete.

The best things were always a mystery. But a mystery only worked if there was a grand design behind it. He and God understood each other. It had happened too many times for him to doubt. And, he reminded both himself and God, if he was wrong, who would know?

He drank a beer while chopped bacon slowly cooked and then broke three eggs into the pan, sprinkled them with diced scallions and a handful of grated hunter’s cheddar, eight doses of Tabasco, salt and pepper. Stirred this slowly over low heat so the cheese melted into the eggs and the eggs gathered in light curds and he tipped this out onto a plate, rinsed out the iron skillet, set it back on the warm rangetop to dry and sat to eat. He had another beer with supper. As
he ate the scheme and design for the gates fell fully into place. Along with the open ovals he’d hot-forge four solid iron eggs from heavier round stock—no mean trick but the job of crafting solid eggs from raw bar, the eggs perfect and unblemished, all by hammerwork stirred that edge of challenge. Two for the top of each gate, one on the inner and the other on the outer of the highest upright rods. So the iron eggs would appear to balance atop the points.

He sat in the low glow of light from the kitchen for a time. The house was very quiet and familiar but there was also the sudden and strange sense of it being empty. He wondered where Jessica was, if he’d see her again. He wouldn’t let himself worry about her—there was no indication whatsoever that anyone in the world worrying about another person had ever once had any effect. Not to confuse worry with action but then for action you have to have direction and Hewitt was without direction as far as Jessica was concerned.

S
OMETIME AROUND THE
end of the day that his father died and the beginning of the next Hewitt sat with his mother at the small table in the locked room in the basement. It was no accident Mary Margaret had pressed Hewitt to read the will before Beth arrived. All was straightforward enough, with assets and insurance policies intact.

Then there was the codicil on a separate sheet of paper, the two short lines addressed only to Hewitt and his mother.

He’d looked up from the will and said, “Why’s he leave Beth out of this part? It doesn’t seem right.”

Mary Margaret Pearce poured out a great sigh, one that moved her entire upper body. She said, “There’s no earthly need for her to know any of this. We must trust your father’s wisdom, Hewitt. By the time he wrote this out, he knew her well, and knew what she might make of it. There’s damage enough as it is. It’s going to be hard enough to convince her why he chose to leave the paintings to you. Although she’ll be well pleased with the money, I suspect.”

“Mother.”

She held up her hand. “As I said, I love her as a mother loves a daughter. With clear eyes.”

“Alright. But the sugarhouse?”

Now Mary Margaret looked down where her hands were turning in her lap. Hewitt waited. When she finally looked up she was wet-faced and tears ran silent from both eyes. “Oh,” she said and caught her breath. “Oh isn’t it just like him Hewitt. You know it’s no accident it’s raining this night.”

He was silent. Taking in this suggestion of how great she believed his father’s powers not only had been but remained. It was the grief of deep love.

He stood and went behind her and held her shoulders, kneading gently, feeling those strong small shoulders suddenly gone weak and knobby. As her son he’d not until this night had to comfort his mother. Quietly he said, “You want to burn it now? Tonight?”

She rocked against the pressure of his hands, just the right amount of love in touch she could tolerate from another human, son or not. After a bit she said, “No, no. I’ll call Robert Dutton and tell him what we plan for first light and see if, barring a true emergency, he could have a truck and small crew on hand. He wants the sugarhouse burned, we’ll burn it. But I won’t be looked on as a crazed widow.” And she craned her head up to look at her son. “Or perhaps a crazed widow but one had enough sense to have the fire department boys on hand.”

She stood from under his hands and said, “Now lock this place tight and upstairs we go. There’s a story about your father you need to know.”

“There’s more?”

She looked at him and said, “There’s always more.”

Upstairs they sat with glasses of wine as the steady autumn rain watered their reflections in the windows.

“You remember your grandmother?” Mary Margaret asked.

Hewitt was thinking about Emily, now driving through the night to be with him. After a moment he said, “I think I do. I know she
was here some when I was little but, Mother, I can’t recall her face. I remember
something
of her. A sense of her being in a room or eating dinner with us. I felt uncomfortable around her. I guess just the fear of a little boy around someone I was supposed to know but didn’t really. I don’t think I was ever comfortable with her.”

His mother studied him briefly and said, “You’d not be the first to feel that way around Lydia Pearce.”

Then she said, “Although it’s a curious thing about mothers; any disaster that befalls their children could’ve been averted if only they’d been present. And so there she was, first stuck in Holland and then evacuated to England but unable to get home for the duration of the war. And finally home just long enough to get to know her son’s wife and young daughter when they were lost. It was several years before I was to meet her and she was far too fine and grand to be hostile toward me but there was a caginess about her that never went away. I think by then she’d grown wary of all the workings of the world and perhaps she had better reasons for that than some. But I’m meandering.”

T
HOMAS
P
EARCE SKETCHED
and sketched but threw everything away. Sometimes she’d not see him for days at a time, even after without great discussion one Sunday afternoon he moved her belongings into his studio, Thomas going out the next day while she was at work to purchase a sturdy chest of drawers and comfortable chair for her. He worked little in the studio but would always turn up, middle of the night or any time of day with his sketchpad and box of hard and soft pencils, the case with the pens and small compartments for nibs and tucked-tight bottles of ink. But if there was ever anything completed and brought home she never saw it.

The easel and paints and stretched canvases remained untouched. And he didn’t talk about it or complain or voice his frustration in any way. Except the deeply brutal brooding. Her girlfriends told her she was crazy living this life lacking all signals of permanency and she
laughed and agreed with them and went on her way. The kitchen manager of her hotel learned she was living with a man and fired her and she told Thomas nothing of this but simply walked a dozen blocks and found a job in another hotel with the same hours and in the interview all she said was that her husband was disabled from the war and that was enough. And she felt less guilt over living with him without the sanction of the church than she did from this lie; not because of the lie but the terrible truth that lay behind it. As far as she was concerned she was married to Thomas Pearce. She was as bound to him as any life she could imagine and in ways she couldn’t articulate even to herself lying silent in bed beside him at three o’clock in the morning but she knew it was true.

Time to time someone from his old life would appear. She had no idea if he saw any of these people outside the studio but doubted it. Some were painters, obvious by the dark pigment crescents packed snug against their cuticles, while others were harder to characterize—well-dressed men and occasional women who made her nervous; the conspicuous air of the solicitous about them, an attitude she disliked but Thomas seemed to meet with a suspended fatigue, as if he understood more the people who sought him out then he did himself. During those visits she’d retreat behind the curtains into the living quarters to wait their departure, although sometimes with the other painters this was a long wait, with the voice of the visitor often grown loud enough so if she could not clearly hear the words she understood the tenor. And when they did depart almost always an unopened gift bottle of wine or gin or whisky was left behind, which would disappear within days. Thomas Pearce was not drinking and so Mary Margaret wasn’t either. Only time to time as he sat looking out the window onto the adjoining rooftops and the sliver of East River as the light turned to night did she feel the least twinge of something passing her by. But she’d never dream of exchanging what she had for anything she might imagine. Even if what she had she owned no words for.

Then in the spring of 1950 she arrived home from work one early afternoon to find a pair of serviceable used steamer trunks on the floor of the studio.

“What’s this?”

“Would you take a trip with me?”

“Where to?”

“Nova Scotia. A little town on the northwest coast. For the summer.”

She’d thought a long moment and then said, “Perhaps it’s time we have a talk.”

And he’d come to her and taken her hands and said, “That was one of the things I intended for this summer.”

“And the others?” she asked.

He was pensive a moment and then said, “It’s a risk. But I think if I’ll ever paint again it might begin there.”

She said, “And if it shouldn’t happen that way? Will that change what you and I talk over?”

He looked at her a long beat of time. She heard a boat’s whistle out on the river. That she would always recall as the sound of arriving and departing, never known. Then he said, “Not for me.”

“Why Nova Scotia? Have you been there before?”

“No. Although it’s where my father came from.”

“Are you looking for family then?”

“No.” He was adamant. “They’d know nothing of me and no reason to.” And that was all he’d say of the matter. A few months later when they were married she learned his middle name from their marriage certificate and recalled not only the people they rented their cottage from bore that same name but the large fish processing plant and one of the mercantiles did as well.

He took only his sketchbooks and pencils and pens. She didn’t question how this squared with his desire to paint again.

The village lay at the end of a long spit of land and pair of islands parallel to the northwest coast with the great Bay of Fundy just over
the spine of land. The wind- and sea-stunted trees and low bushes reminded her of Ireland but other than that it was like no place she’d ever been. Their cottage was on a rise above tidal flats that the village and fishing works and docks surrounded in a horseshoe shape while at the end of the land the waters churned through the passage separating this tip from the final island. The first few days she hiked with Thomas but his concentrated silence was too great for her and she retreated to the cottage, grateful for the crate of books she’d packed. Daily she walked to market and bought fresh foodstuffs and fish and made their meals. The people were friendly and curious in their reserved way and she held herself likewise, knowing it was enough to say her husband was an artist from New York.

The first week they made small talk over meals and sat high on the ridge watching the long slow sunset and deep northern twilight and once he arrived home midafternoon in a great hurry to take her down to the bluff overlooking the passage to watch a pod of whales moving through. Each morning he set out with his rucksack of pencils and pads, a thermos of coffee and a sandwich and each afternoon he returned and said nothing of his day but she saw the color from the sun and wind coming up into his face and saw too something gaining, a newness about him and she hoped things were going well.