A Peculiar Grace (12 page)

“He was some sort of machine tool manufacturer. But anyway—”

“So their daughter was your little girlfriend, that what you’re telling me?”

“I’d say she was the first girl I kissed but your niece Amber got me first.”

“We all know that. What’s it got to do with a Mississippi Beetle painted like a merry-go-round?”

“Well, some years ago that girl Dana Kimball and her husband came through to see the leaves and stopped and we all hit it off. And kept in touch. Nothing much, Christmas cards and such.” Hewitt paused but was too deeply into what was unrolling to let it stop. “He’s a professor at some university down there. Near Jackson, I think.”

“Got married in a fever. Hotter’n a pepper sprout.”

Hewitt blinked, thought Johnny Cash and laughed. Then was quickly sober. “So this girl, Jessica. She’s their daughter. Been going through a pretty rough patch in her life and her family knows I’ve had some tough times myself. So they called and asked could she stay with me a bit. She needed to get out of where she was. Maybe she got left at the altar, as they say. And so she’s here for a week or so. She’s young. Young take those things hard sometimes. You know what I mean, Bill?”

Bill looked thoughtful. For quite a time. Hewitt was sweating and thinking Bill wasn’t buying any of it. About the time Hewitt registered that Bill was looking beyond, toward the house, Bill said, “I guess here she comes now.”

Hewitt turned and Jesus Christ here she came. In soft tan leather boots to just below her knees and a sleeveless dress of thin copper-colored material that ended just inches above her knees. The dress was thin and so flowed and worked itself against her forward motion. With the boots and the color of the dress against her white skin and her black hair brushed out if not otherwise arranged she was still, for the time and place, something stepped out of the television or the pages of a magazine.

She walked right past Hewitt to the tractor where she leaned up tiptoe, extending her arm and it seemed to Hewitt her whole body projected slightly toward Bill Potwin. Hewitt was without words.

Jessica said, “Hey.” It seemed at the moment that the gravel and accent of her voice intensified. “I’m Jessica Kress from Water Valley, Mississippi. I never once thought the North could be as pretty as this. I always thought it wasn’t a thing but cities. But this certainly is beautiful country. So cool and lovely for June.”

Bill Potwin sat on his tractor looking down at her. He rubbed the several days’ stubble on his chin. Then dropped his hand long enough to touch hers and took it away again. And said, “Jessica. That’s a pretty name.”

She shrugged. “My mama had so much imagination she named me after a song.”

Potwin seemed to roll this information around his mouth. Hewitt guessed he needed to spit from his chew but wasn’t about to. Bill said, “And Hewitt, now he’s an old friend of your mother.”

She’d taken her arm back to her side but shifted a hip which the boot accentuated. “Oh my yes. I can’t ever remember not hearing about Hewitt.”

Hewitt thought That was good—she didn’t flinch.

Potwin said, “I guess this hot we got here idn’t anything you’re not used too.” Getting comfortable looking at her.

And Jessica said, “Oh Lord no. This time of year where I come from hot is like being naked and rolled up in a boiled blanket.” She waited for Bill Potwin to absorb that image and added, “And that’s nighttime.”

Bill leaned back harder against his seat and looked up the hillside to the fields of waiting hay, flowing in patterns as the breeze moved through. He hawked his juice off the far side of the tractor and looked back at her. He said, “Well missy. I got to go cut some hay. But this weather holds a couple days from now I’ll be baling. I like to bale onto a wagon. I need someone who can make a load. If you got long pants and want to work I’d be happy to hire you. I’d show you how it’s done.”

She looked off, appearing to study the haybine although from where Hewitt stood he could see her eyes darting. Then in a brave disdainful voice she said to Bill, “I’ve worked plenty.”

“Well now.” Potwin briefly scrutinized Hewitt. “It depends on what the weather does. You might not get much warning.”

Jessica said, “Right now mostly I’m not hard to find.”

Bill looked at Hewitt. Who did not move. Nor let his face change at all. Bill nodded then and threw high the throttle and fired the Deere and puffs of diesel smoke spouted from the stack and lifted skyward. Bill shouted something down to Jessica. Then put the tractor in gear and it and the haybine went up the hill.

Jessica turned to Hewitt and said, “What did he say?”

He now was free to study her up and down. He said, “Why did you do that?”

She was quick. “I can’t hide, Hewitt. So I figured the least I can do is distract them a little.”

“I’d say you did that just fine.”

She looked at him a disconcerting while. Then said, “Old men are the saddest thing.”

He wasn’t going to let her off so easy. He said, “For a girl trying to stay hidden you can sure put it out there.”

“It’s sex and dreams, Hewitt. Young girls and old men. Me, I’m just waiting for that happy day when I’ll be a ugly old woman.”

He was having enough difficulty with her transformation, as well as his own unrolling spewed story. He hoped it wouldn’t come back to bite him in the ass. And it was useless to try and explain to her certain women as well as men grew more desirable with age.

She was no longer looking at him. But up the hill where out of sight they could hear the rhythm of the tractor and the chunk chunk chunk of the mower spitting swathes of hay behind it.

Then she turned back to Hewitt and said, “What was it he said? As he was revving up and leaving?”

Hewitt looked at her. She shot her eyebrows and held his gaze.

Hewitt said, “He said if you want to stack hay, you need to get some gloves.” Leaving off “for those pretty little hands.”

She shook her head and said, “They always want to make you spend money on something, don’t they?”

Hewitt ignored this. He said, “I’ve got some you could use. But I think he was tossing out a little test to see how you’d take it. Bill always uses a kicker on his baler and bales into high-sided wagons. Not the sort of deal where you stack the load but let it just pile up.” Wondering if he was right, wondering if Potwin was thinking about a nice tightly stacked load. Kicker loads always had a fair number of bent and broken bales. Not the kind you’d get three and a half dollars apiece for. It wasn’t his worry. If Bill Potwin could talk Jessica into doing the job the work might be good for her.

“I’m going into town,” she said. “Anything I can pick up?”

“Town?” he repeated, nerved up high just like that.

“Lympus?” she said. “I drove through there the night I ended up on your hillside. Isn’t that the name?”

He said, “Not much to Lympus anymore. The post office. A store of sorts, a gas station with some groceries and junk food and beer. You could get your fishing license there, buy nightcrawlers too. That’s about it.”

“Sound’s fine,” she said. “It’s just a couple miles down the road isn’t it?”

“Jessica, and I’m not being nosy, but I can’t imagine what you’d need there I probably don’t already have.” He still didn’t know her well enough to guess when or what might set her off as she’d been three days ago. And within this was a confusion, of wanting to keep her as much to himself as he could, at least for the time being.

“You are too being nosy. I want to buy one of those phone cards.”

“Oh hell,” he said. “Unless you’re going to call Spain and talk a couple hours you can use the phone in the house.”

“What do you think? Am I overdressed for downtown Lympus?”

He smiled despite himself. “They’ll notice you.”

“That’s alright. They’d notice me anyway. And thanks but I’d as soon make my calls in private.”

“I wasn’t planning on listening in.” Guessing she didn’t want the record of her calls on his phone bill.

She nodded and said, “Well then, do you have any tampons?” A slow smirk of pleasure twitching the corners of her mouth. She went on, “And I’m the crazy daughter of an old friend of yours, is that the story?”

He shook his head. “Going through a bit of hard time. Your fictional mother came up here a couple summers a long time ago. Dana Kimball. But there’s hardly anybody who remembers her. Nothing anybody’s going to grill you about.” Then because he couldn’t help himself he added, “You can buy lightweight leather work gloves at the store that would fit you. Mine would be too big and you’d end up with worse blisters than no gloves at all.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I thought you were going to help Bill Potwin put up hay.”

She studied him a bit. She had the Volkswagen key out and was jingling it in one palm. She said, “Like I told you Hewitt. My boobs are not my eyes. I got no time for a fool thinks otherwise. Old Bill’s going to have to get along without me.” And she walked over and smacked an almost cartoon kiss on his cheek and walked on toward the shed. He watched her go. Her shoulders dropped into the length of her back and the dress drew against her hips and tightened over her ass as she walked. Abruptly she spun and dropped into a movie gunfighter crouch and pointed a finger pistol at him and said, “You are so busted.”

Hewitt grinned at her. He said, “It’s biology is all it is Jessica.”

“No,” she said. “Biology is a dissected frog.” She opened the door of the Bug and then said, “Lust is not a dissected frog. It’s a much uglier thing.”

“I do believe,” Hewitt said, “there’s a strong distinction between the appreciation of beauty and lust.” As she stepped down into the
little car. She started it and drove it out into the yard and pulled alongside him. Her window already cranked down. She had the trace of a grin again. She said, “I’m a frog, Hewitt. And don’t you forget it. Or I’ll tell my mama you’re a dirty old man.”

And she pressed hard the gas and dropped into second and spun a plume of dust down the drive and he could see the brake lights flash through the dust as she came to the road and then she was out onto the blacktop and gone.

So Jessica was down to Lympus. A good thing Hewitt decided. Even if she were to stay only a few more days, better to let his neighbors meet and learn something of her. The phone card nagged. He didn’t care really who she was calling. But had a glimmer of fear a handful of people met in her wayward trek might be alerted to a good place to come to. He didn’t think she’d do such a thing. But admitted he could not say for sure. He was disposed toward her but didn’t know the first thing about her.

So he went strident with purpose down into the forge. To keep himself busy and not worry. He stirred the dead fire and pulled out a handful of clinkers and arranged the old coal with some new in a well and crumpled a single sheet of newspaper and struck a match to it. Burned that off and ignored the edges of coal showing lines of orange—the first sheet was to warm the chimney—and then wadded paper again and pulled the coal closer and fired it. This time waiting and watching for the right moment for a light puff from the hand-cranked bellows and watched and cranked again. There were jets of smoke and the chimney caught them and they rode up out of sight and the fire was lit. Now a matter of waiting for a hot working fire. Coal transformed to coke. Unsure what he’d do this day. He hadn’t yet looked at the huge gates.

Sometime later that afternoon he heard Bill come down the hill and idle briefly in the farmyard but Hewitt did not come forth from the forge. By then he was working. He’d rifled through the stack of sketches for the gate and didn’t like any of the original ideas for how
to fill the slender circles within the heavier woven straps. The main structure, the interwoven flattened and hammer-worked straps had been a design stolen from an accident. The autumn before he’d been in the carriage barn and his work boot came down hard upon an egg basket, a beauty at least a century old. Woven from inch-wide strips of ash split thin and soaked for pliability, it crushed and flattened under the heavy boot. And even while he was mourning the loss he was struck by the way the splintered basket did not fall apart but spread, the ash splits warped from the long tight weaving but opening as if a fan, a latticework holding a vestige of its old texture suggesting a new form—the geometry contained in the weaving, now set free but indelibly marked.

So he returned to that original notion. Staring and squinting at the gates he saw immediately that the quarter-inch round stock he’d made circles from was the beginning of where he’d gone wrong. Those circles were not meant to hold anything and so broke the symmetry of the design. He spent the afternoon with a welding torch and a cold chisel and fine double-faced hammer, heating through the welds and tapping them free, swiftly using the cold chisel to remove traces of the weld from the flat bars as the circles fell away. He felt no remorse in undoing what had taken weeks of work—if you didn’t have the patience to undo what was not right you shouldn’t try to make anything. Not even a plank stand to nail a mailbox on a post.

It was dusk when he finished. Thirty-two iron rings were neatly stacked and the gates were upright again, side by side, all beads and needles of the welding gone, filed off with a half round. He’d switched on the pair of adjustable floodlights overhead but could still see the pale twilit sky out the northern window lights. It was warm in the forge but not hot—he’d not ended up using the hearth so the fire had burned itself down, warmed the bricks and died away. For a time he sat on the bigger of the anvils. Not trying to figure a thing out. Just being there.

He looked again at the gates and again the pile of circles.

Tucked under the main workbench was a series of small deep drawers. Not something he had made but had come with the hemlock bench from Albert Farrell all those years ago. He pulled open the drawer under the bench vise. From the back he pulled out a carton of horseshoe nails, the cardboard softened with age and the blue lettering all but illegible. He removed a small stone pipe and an old metal screw top can that once held an assortment of cotter pins. He unscrewed the top and lifted out a tightly packed flowerbud half the size of his thumbnail and crushed it slightly as he placed it in the pipe. And sat on the anvil and smoked the pipe down. It was a year old but Jesus give a farmer a seed and within a couple of years he’d know what he was doing. Especially if he was motivated.