A Peculiar Grace (46 page)

Hewitt stood not moving. Christ, what a relief. Rufus was here, alive and tight against her, his fine sleek skull pressing against the side of her face. She was rocking from the waist up, holding the cat. Then he realized what he was seeing—the cat was fighting her; pulling his head away and squirming and as she grasped tighter the hind legs digging and reaching, finding purchase in her thigh and clamping hard into her flesh to push himself loose and Hewitt was moving across the room when Rufus got a front leg free and clawed the side of her face. She screamed and the cat struck again, on to the same ripped cheek. She hurled the cat away in a blurred pinwheel. He struck the floor yowling and darted from the room.

Hewitt had one of those stand-alone moments when he realized things had just gone from bad to deeply worse.

She was bleeding, one hand pressed against her cheek, the sobs held back broken free now, a spitting erratic moaning cry as if words were trying to force through. Hewitt was over her, leaning down, his hands on her elbows, gently lifting her, his own voice a sweet lowdown croon. “Honey he didn’t mean to hurt you he was just scared come
on now we’ve got to wash this out you’ve got to let me see it,” and she let him lift her and came against him, the hand still pressed tight, streaked with blood and he circled her belly just below her ribs with one arm and felt the shaking there as he guided her up the stairs to the bathroom where he let go of her and ran the tap until the water was warm, still talking as he found a clean washcloth, alcohol, gauze and adhesive tape, lining them along the rim of the sink, bringing order, trying to allow calm with his own even motions as he said, “You’re okay, you’re all right, it’s just scratches, we’ll just clean it up,” and had the washcloth wet and warm folded into a square and he reached and took away her hand and held it down under the stream of water as he brought the cloth up and gently damped it against the long slashes starting high near her temple and running down close to her ear and out on to her rounded cheek. When he touched her with the cloth she moaned and pulled back, her eyes not meeting his but skittering like a trapped animal and he raised his other hand and easily cupped the back of her head, brought down the washcloth and rinsed it one-handed, squeezing it out and she looked down at the bloody flow of water in the slow draining sink, and he brought the cloth back up and tamped again, this time holding it in place as he tried to determine the next few steps. He took her free hand limp at her side and brought it up and pressed it on to the washcloth and said, “Hold this right here,” and then quickly unrolled gauze and folded a flat pad and laid it on the sink and tore four strips of the tape and tagged them next to the gauze and reached up to the shelves and got a clean dry washcloth. All the while Jessica standing rigid, her fingers trembling where they held the wet cloth against the wounds and her lips sputtering unmade words.

Hewitt reached and took the cloth away and rinsed it again and dabbed again. The blood was slowing but not much. As he did this he also stretched for a handtowel and draped it over a shoulder and still holding the wet cloth in place, opened the alcohol and poured a wide circle into the clean folded washcloth and he felt her flinch
and took away the wet cloth, dropping it into the sink as he dabbed with the towel, pressing gently to dry her face and he said, “I’m going to put some alcohol on there and then bandage it and you’ll be fine,” even as he swept away the towel and brought the alcohol up and pressed it hard into her flesh and her voice caught and yowled the thrown cat’s cry and he had the gauze up and was taping it in place when she caught her breath and sucker punched him in the solar plexus. There was water on the floor and when he stepped back doubling over he slipped and managed to catch the sink with his hands as he went down, saving himself from smashing headfirst into the porcelain.

Then he was upright, recovering, alone. He kept his grip and stared for a moment at the wadded washcloths and bloodstains in the sink. Well he’d fucked that up. The water was still running and he cupped his hands and several times splashed warm water over his face, breathing deeply, letting the cramped muscles around his lungs relax. Then he took up the thrown-down towel and dried off and went looking for her.

S
HE WAS WRAPPED
in a ball in one corner of the couch, her feet under her, turned so her back was bowed toward him, her T-shirt pulled up to cover the wound on her face, the march of her spine rising from her exposed lower back. No longer crying but breathing in deep ragged sweeps of her ribcage and back. The gauze pack was on the floor near where he stood.

A screen of the world slipped. Before he moved, his mind was stepping to bend and lift her, to cradle her against him but then as if it was his only plan picked up the light ancient armless rocker and rounded the couch, setting the chair down and himself into it so he was face to face with her.

Her eyes two wide black grindstones, stark, inert, a gaze into some distance not only beyond but through Hewitt. He held tight a shiver and leaned close, his forearms along the couch back, hands overlapping
and he brought his chin down and rested it on his hands—as close as he could get and not reach to touch her, let his fingers sift down on to her hair.

He said, “Jess, honey? I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

“What do you think it was like, Hewitt?”

“I was only trying to get it over with.”

“Nothing he probably even saw just some unimaginable thing coming over him so sudden and furious to drive his life out of his ears and mouth and nose. What if it was you or me, what would be the thing that could do that, just bolt out of the sky this roaring power then all you are is pressed right out of this world? What would that thing be? And why then? It would be a terrible angel of the Lord to be able to do such a thing. Wouldn’t it?”

“Something like that, I suppose.”

“Maybe it just is. Maybe it’s what it always has been and always will and everything else is nothing but a stupid trick, a bad joke we play on ourselves to pretend it makes sense. But there is no sense and you know it and don’t you pretend you don’t. This is the night of the dead soul, the night of the dead cat, just a cat like any other cat, just like that old man Emmett was just a man rolled over by the black that hides always behind the light we think we see, the light we all pray is there.”

Hewitt said, “Maybe we’re only breaking down that light into colors we can see. How do you explain the dark? The whatever it is when there’s no light. That light you pray for.”

“I don’t pray, Hewitt.”

“Not ever? When that guy was beating you up and you were balled up on the ground?”

“I’ll tell you what. If someone gave us God they were just cowards and if God was the one gave us God then He’s plug ugly meanness is all I can see. If this is all only some sort of test He can shove it up His ass because just how long, how long a test does He require? People talk about His plan. There’s no plan, people!”

“Well now, I’ve felt that way plenty but then something happens, and I look back and see how one thing led to another and how it couldn’t have turned out anyway but the way it did, although it was never what I thought or hoped for. So how would you explain that? Isn’t that some sort of plan? Some hidden map to life?” Struggling to ride with her, to do what he’d promised himself—to be there when the bough snapped. To cushion her falling.

“It’s not hidden. You connect it backwards, Hewitt. I grew up with God as frightening and spooky as Boo Radley. But you know what? God is either a long-ago fragment of history’s fucked-up imagination or plain sick of us and taken up with new, more interesting projects. He’s sidelined us for good but I have to wonder Hewitt if we all stopped doing things the way we do and started doing it some other way altogether then maybe way off in the far beyond place of the universe He’d stop what He’s up to now and lift up His head and shake it thinking something’s missing—there’s an old old sound I don’t hear anymore and after a while maybe remember us and come a bit closer than He seems to be now and see we’ve stopped doing all those things we do over and over to each other and maybe then there would be a God.”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe it doesn’t matter if we invented Him or He invented us. Maybe we’re barking up the wrong tree. I don’t try to understand it but decided a long time ago, the only things in this life worth much to me are things most people pass right by. Everybody loves a pretty sunset but how many walk through a snowstorm that turns to sleet and watch the ice form on every smallest twig and branch and dead leaf on the ground or sit on a raining spring evening and see the hundreds of shades of green on the hill across with its little smokes of mist rising or one long slant of light that comes through a break in the clouds for half a minute and then is gone? And maybe it’s just a random ball of rock and mud and water but for better or worse the old earth is all we really have for sure and even if it’s an illusion, a fracture between what’s truly out there and what our eyes see and our brains believe—well,
there’s nothing I can do about that but I do know one day I’ll go back into the earth and whatever was me, the me that thinks and feels and cries and hurts and smiles, well that me will either find out what else there is or will become some part of the earth again and either way it’s all right. It’s all right with me.”

Her eyebrows pulled tight. She said, “How do you ever get your brain to slow down enough to see all that?”

“Listen, Jessica. You remember the fella played the fiddle at the party? Well, his dad used to be about the best around and most every Friday night a whole bunch of people would get together at one house or another and clear out the kitchen and sing and dance and play fiddle and guitar or piano all night long, the women cooking up big meals at midnight and going on right until dawn was breaking and they’d load up their old cars or buggies and go home and start right into a full day’s work without a snatch of rest but they didn’t
need
rest because how they spent the night did the job. It’d be nice to think that those were better times, maybe something we’ve lost for good but you know what? You know what, Jessica?”

She said. “Tell me.”

“There was also always some old hermits tucked back who didn’t go to those kitchen junkets, those ones who would show up at the store a couple times a year to buy salt and sugar and coffee, whatever they couldn’t grow or hunt or get one way or another, who might appear at haying time to earn some cash money or at butchering time in the fall because they knew how to do it best but otherwise they kept to themselves and there were some thought they were simple or not right in the head but you know what I’m thinking—”

“What?”

Soft, questing, he said, “You tell me.”

Slowly she ventured, “They were the ones like me?”

“No, Jess. Like us. They were the ones like us.”

“You’re not quite so fucked-up as me.”

“You’re not as fucked-up as you think you are.”

She lifted her head a little, her eyes curious, quizzical. “So, what, Hewitt? You think I just spit myself out my own window ten years ago? You think I just was in the wrong place all those years? You think I just need to shed my skin, like putting on a new set of clothes? You think it wasn’t only everybody else but me also, that was all wrong about me? Come on, Hewitt.”

He said, “What about your grandmother? Was she wrong, too?”

She looked away. Then back at him and nodded. “Maybe she was. Maybe she was strong enough to walk with it and let it hold her up rather than press her down. Maybe that’s what she saw in Celeste, too. And wanted for me. She did what she could—hell she gave me the keys out. But she was up against a brick wall with my mother and father. And she died before I was old enough to understand why she was telling me all those stories, what she was really trying to give me, to show me.” She paused, chewed her lip and then grinned quick at him and said, “See? It still comes round to being fucked-up if I couldn’t figure that out until now.”

He grinned and said, “You’re just a late bloomer.”

“A slow learner.”

“Nope. That’s me. That’s my cart to haul.”

“You pulling hard?”

“Hard enough, girl. Hard enough.”

“What would happen if you quit? Let go of it?”

“How’d this get turned around from talking about you to talking about me?”

“Hell, Hewitt. I thought we were hashing out the universe and everything else under the sun.”

He was quiet a moment and then said, “It’s like years ago I got happily up on the horse and started to ride. It was rough riding too. But after a while, you realize your legs have grown into the side of the horse. There’s no longer any horse, any you. It’s all one big motion forward.”

“Is that the life you were talking about?”

He only looked at her.

She said, “Maybe you should just shoot that fucker in the head. And see what happens.”

He said, “Remind me again. Who was it said you were crazy?”

“I did. That was me.”

“I see.” And he rose a bit out of the chair toward her across the couch and she came up as he reached and held her, their faces side by side, her T-shirt falling back down and she whispered into his ear, “Hey, Hewitt.”

“Hey, yourself.”

She leaned back, her arms still around him, up around his neck now and said, “So how’s my face?”

“Stunning,” he said. “Except for those long stripes that look, well, they look like you got in a cat fight. But they’ll heal.”

“You think so?”

“They will. They’ll heal fine.”

“What I’ll do,” she said. “Tomorrow I’ll go out and buy some vitamin E capsules. And split them open and spread that stuff on. That works real good.”

They were quiet a short while. Hewitt’s mouth was dry and he was trying to figure out what to do next.

And Jessica lifted her chin, looking at him.

When the telephone rang.

They both heard the click halfway through the second ring as the machine picked it up and he could hear his own heart as he held his breath.

Muffled, urgent. “Hewitt?”