A Peculiar Grace (16 page)

There was a cob-smoked ham steak in the fridge and he thought half of that would be just the ticket after his day of work. He should walk out to the asparagus bed and cut the fresh stalks certainly up since his first supper with Jessica.

His hand swiped down along his front pocket to feel the weight and length of his jackknife. He walked to the screen door opening off the porch down into the yard, recalling Joseph Kress admitting he’d provided his unstable daughter with a handgun. For protection. Standing on the soft evening grass, now with the barn in sight and the swallows in their furious end-of-day feeding on insects. It was a frightening thing. Not that a man would feel he should take that step, knowing there was a deep unholy gamble involved. But more a profound sadness a girl so far off kilter lived in a world where such a choice had to be made.

He went down to the patch and worked slowly through, cutting the thicker stalks and tucking them into his shirt pocket.

He was halfway back to the house when he realized it had been days since he’d picked up his mail. Nothing would be there except bills and catalogues and other rubbish. But while the box on its post was large there was only so much the rural route carrier could stuff in. A single mother with three kids. No reason to make her life more difficult. Or his—at least a dozen times Stuart at the post office had called to remind him to empty his box. So he went out the drive on to the hardtop and lifted out the armful of mail, hugging it to the right side of his chest to not break the asparagus as he walked to the house.

Inside he spilled it all down on the kitchen table and then laid the tender spears in the clean sink. He’d noted the Bluffport, New York, paper wrapped around the mail and thought he’d page through as he ate. He took the ham wrapped in white butcher paper from the fridge and laid it on the counter, about to pull the tape free to unwrap it when he stopped and stepped slowly away, as if backing from coiled danger. After a moment he returned to the table and pulled free the paper and unfolded it so the entire front section lay flat below him. He placed his knuckles either side of the newspaper and leaned down to the lead story.

Sweet Mary Mother of God.

N
USSBAUM WAS DEAD
. Emily’s Dr. Martin Nussbaum was dead. According to the account near midnight his Lexus struck a cow that wandered through a broken fence on to a county road. Died of massive head and chest injuries. The article gave little more information. So little in fact Hewitt had no choice but to conclude there was more story but not to put in the paper. The blessing of the small town weekly which still, near alone in these days, regarded privacy as an essential quality of integrity. No mention of why the good doctor had been out driving at such an hour of the night, nor where he’d been traveling to or from. If he’d been at the hospital or a medical crisis this would’ve been mentioned. The piece largely focused on the loss to
the community. His survivors. There was no comment from his wife but then why should there be?

Nussbaum was dead. Hewitt wandered back and forth across the kitchen. Dead and buried. He bent and leafed through to the obituary but this provided no information Hewitt did not already know.

He wandered. Was it possible he’d somehow wanted this? Hoped for it? No. A divorce yes. But not this. Dead and buried. Hewitt could not have precisely stated the day of the week so he got down the feed-store calendar and placed it next to the paper. Son of a bitch. Emily’s husband died the night, not far from the hour, that Jessica had first driven into his life. Was buried three days later, the morning service and committal would have been the day after he and Jessica had driven into Hanover.

All things someway are connected. Jessica was disturbed and disturbing but she was no dark angel. And, however he looked at it, neither was she an impediment to any plans that might result from this tragedy dropped from the sky.

What plans?

A sudden image of himself arriving in Bluffport by bus, if such service even existed anymore, and then what? Stroll over to the home of the recent widow and present himself? As if Emily would be waiting for him?

He could send a cautious condolence note. And wait each day for the return letter in the mail. Which might or might not come. And saw clearly this could take him down again. He wasn’t sure he could endure a version in his forties of what he went through in his twenties. He should be wiser. In fact he thought if anything the expansion of the years would render him less capable of surviving another episode, another hurling into the morass of self that might very well prove endless this time.

He had no idea. But his agitation was severe and growing more so as the evening ticked along. A literal ticking since the only audible sound was the steady drone of the old electric clock on the shelf over
the sink, next to the AM radio of similar vintage. For farm and weather reports and the daily noontime call-in Trading Post.

He was shaking. Walking the room and shaking. Each thought that ran through his mind seemed to reach out and snag some arcane or nonsensical tag that played along as if mocking him. He felt himself suddenly dangerous. Serious slippage. The fucking clock was driving him nuts. He walked to the sink and reached a hand down under the shelf and was about to pull the plug when he thought The clock is driving me nuts?

He went to the cabinet over the sink and took down the bottle of whisky and rolled it in his hands. The seal unbroken. What better time than now? Or worse. He put the bottle back on the shelf and went to the telephone, lifted the receiver and dialed.

Eight long rings. Hewitt knew to wait. On the twelfth a voice broke into his ear.

“What.”

“I need you,” Hewitt said. His voice a radio wave.

The shortest of waits. Then, “Ten minutes.”

Hewitt started to say Thanks but the line was dead.

W
ALTER
B
OYNTON WAS
eight years older than Hewitt and so was the remote teenager with the motorcycle when Hewitt was a boy. When Walter returned from Vietnam, Hewitt looked with silent fear upon the long-haired man with his wornout fatigues and permanent sunglasses who was home only six months when his wife of five years moved out, taking their three-year-old daughter with her, moved back to Pennsylvania and then, last Hewitt had heard from Walter, on to Oregon. Hewitt stayed away from him and Walter seemed oblivious to his existence. For Hewitt then the war was not complicated but simply wrong and thus, sophomorically, fighting in it was also. At the time he’d already made up his mind to go to Canada if it ran on that long. They only became friends after the three-year disaster that began with Thomas Pearce’s death, the bad next year with Emily and then the final winter
after which Mary Margaret decamped for warmer climes. It was then Walter came into Hewitt’s life, just showing up one afternoon and letting himself down into the forge and making small talk. He was the only person Hewitt had never thrown out for entering without an invitation. Walter lived with his grandmother who took him in after his wife and daughter left, Walter later telling Hewitt, “She was deaf so she slept right through my bad nights. My father was nervous about it, afraid I’d prowl around the house and strangle the old woman in my dreams. But I’d a never hurt anyone and my grandmother piped up and told them to mind their own business, she’d been through it with my grandfather after World War One and could do it again. That shut em up.” Hewitt went a few times to have dinner with them, the old woman with her massive hearing aids seated at the end of the cherry dining room table set with the good china and lighted candles and at Walter’s probing told stories of her life, wonderful tales of humor and tragedy and without being too greatly aware of it, herself at center stage and always trudging through, head high. Walter said, “I’ve heard em all at least a dozen times but it does her good to tell em and truth is, long after she’s gone I’ll hear that voice and those tales and if anything except my own cussedness saved me it was her. And not just putting a roof over my head.”

When the old woman died Hewitt was, excluding great-grandchildren, the youngest person at her funeral. Hewitt remembered well the autumn weekend Walter summoned his brother and three sisters and they arrived to find all but the most simple furniture arrayed on the front lawn. Take what you want, was Walter’s command. He allowed none inside the house to see what he’d reserved for himself but this didn’t matter because the pile of lovely ancient pieces on the front lawn produced a near comic effect amongst his siblings. Hewitt was there. By two in the afternoon the yard was bare except for an old chair with a burst rush seat. Walter had walked over and lifted it and said, “Brian Cranmore will recane the seat for eight dollars. The chair was made around 1790.” He’d looked then at Hewitt and said, “The world is full of fools.” And led him inside.

He withheld enough so the house was furnished but just. And already had begun to transform the place, painting over the white plaster walls in each room according to his fancy or Hewitt suspected, some unspeakable plan. The dining room was still white—Walter had not yet coated those walls with the aluminum paper. What few people saw was the empty room off the kitchen that had once been a living room and was now heavy plank bookshelves, with a single upholstered wingchair and stacks of more books in random spirals on the floor. There was also a writing desk—a secretary jammed against one wall with an old three-legged milking stool before it as a seat. What Walter was up to in that room not even Hewitt knew.

Everyone assumed Walter had inherited enough money, along with his benefits, to live this quiet life. Perhaps he had, but the old cape village home had an extensive and complex garden in the basement. On certain days if the weather was right, despite the ventilating system that entered the furnace chimney in that same basement you could sit upstairs and smell the plants below. This was not a worry for Walter. No one came to his house uninvited. His customers were all far from the area. He wouldn’t even sell to Hewitt. Although once a year he’d appear and chat and leave a small gift behind.

Walter walked in without knocking because he was already invited, with a fat spliff just lighted clamped in the side of his mouth like a comic hoodlum and without removing it let loose a burst of rich smoke into the room and said, “S’up, bro?”

Then took the bomber from his mouth and handed it to Hewitt. The small end as dry as if it had never known a mouth. Hewitt held it, looked at it, considered where it might take him which this evening was anywhere at all and handed it back.

Walter said, “Oh it’s bad, huh?”

Walter laid it fire end out on the counter. Hewitt said, “I’m in a world of shit.”

Walter nodded, pulled out a chair from the table and turned it around so the back was facing Hewitt, swung a leg over it and settled
down, his arms folded gently over the rounded back of the chair, his chin resting on the arms. He said, “You want to tell me?”

The old part he didn’t need to go into. Just the news and the absolute benumbing confusion of what to do next. If anything.

Walter listened through it all. Without moving. And sat a time after Hewitt stopped, still silent. Then he stood and retrieved the joint and fired it and in a floated cloud said, “So what’s the plan?”

“I don’t have a plan. Why do you think I called you?”

“To tell you what to do? I hope not.”

“Fuck you. You’re the only person who really understood the whole deal with Emily.”

“And?”

Hewitt paused. Then said, “And you kicked my sorry ass out of the ditch. And I’ve got no idea what to do.”

Walter squinted and said, “Not necessarily the sort of situation that will do you much good.”

“I can’t ignore it.”

“I imagine not. So?”

“I don’t know Walter. I really don’t.”

“Of course you do.” Walter shrugged. “You held it for twenty-some years. Suddenly things have changed. What makes you think you should know tonight?” He smiled and said, “You’ll have it sorted out by tomorrow afternoon.”

There came a crash on the back porch and both men turned toward the door. Beyond which there was dim cursing and futile struggles with the door that opened out trying to be pushed in before it popped back—the sharp sound of wood against flesh. Jessica came into the kitchen. Across her forehead was a bright red slashmark. She was a mess, clothes wet with dew and smeared with dirt and mud and grass stains but she was upright in the kitchen and was waving the handgun back and forth, but holding it by the barrel and then stopped and drew tight to herself upon seeing Walter, the gun loose down at her side.

Who said, “Hello there.” To Hewitt, “What’s this?”

Hewitt walked right across to her and put one arm around her shoulders and with his other hand took the gun away like waltzing, set it on the sink drainboard, kissed Jessica on the cheek and said, “Walter. This is my friend Jessica.”

To Jessica, “And this is Walter. He’s an old old friend of mine.”

Jessica said, “Are you alright Hewitt? I didn’t hit you, did I? Damn I didn’t know what I was doing—”

Hewitt said, “No, honey. I’m glad you missed. Now be polite and say hello to Walter.”

Jessica looked at Walter. “I don’t know you.”

Walter glanced at Hewitt. Back to Jessica and said, “Did somebody throw you down a mountain?”

“It’s dark out. I was in a hurry. I had a little misunderstanding with Hewitt earlier and wanted to clear it up.”

“I guess that explains the gun.”

She looked at Walter. “I don’t mean to be rude but I really need to talk to Hewitt.”

Walter said, “That’s funny. Because Hewitt really needed to talk to me. I guess this is the night everybody’s in a tear to talk.” At the same time walking to the sink.

Walter looked at Hewitt. As he did he lifted the gun from the drainboard of the sink.

“Hey,” said Jessica. “What’re you doing? Put that back.” She turned to Hewitt. “I got something to tell you and got all clear about it this afternoon and then was driving back and my shit fell all apart … I said put my gun back.”