by Jeffrey Lent
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.
Evenings he’d sit at the kitchen table and work at odd-shaped pieces of driftwood he’d found, using the jackknife he sharpened pencils with and not so much carving the wood as bringing out a bit more the form already seen there. Her favorite was a rounded knobbly wide V-shaped thing bleached to a whorl of silvered wood colors and already resembling a nesting bird that he would study long before taking a small curling slice from one place or another. They’d play cards or word games and listen to the come-and-go Philco radio in its immense cabinet before going to bed.
Sometime late in the second week he began to leave much earlier in the morning and often not return until dusk and there was a curious controlled animation about him, as if he were flying a kite at the limit of its string, taut and near breaking any second. If they talked less during this time she was patient as he would sit in the evenings with a tipped distance in his eyes new or different to her.
Then Wednesday of their fourth week, as she was getting to the bottom of the crate of books and wondering if she should cautiously respond to the handful of women who’d made overtures of if not friendship than at least social niceties and realizing it had indeed been a long time since she’d had a cup of tea and biscuits afternoons and by that time confident she’d no reason to reveal or give the least tip of her nonhusband’s connection to this place, that afternoon he came in early. He placed his rucksack on the table instead of setting it carefully away on the shelf over the icebox.
He said, “There’s a ring belonged to my great-grandmother I’d like to see you wearing.”
“Is there?” she asked. “And why would you want me to do that?”
“I’m asking you to marry me.”
“Is that what it is? I’m thinking it’s something more than that.”
He considered her carefully and said, “We wouldn’t be living in New York any longer.”
“And so where would we be living? Here? Has it been that good for you?”
“Not here. But yes, it has been.”
“Will you show me then?”
“In a moment. In a moment I will. But there’s something else you need to know. And if you say no I understand.”
She stood and walked to the window over the small sink and gazed up the hillside afire with wild blueberries and flowers she did not know. She watched a cloud dip into the spruce atop the ridge. She waited until half of it was gone and turned and said, “I’ve as much as lost my church for you. I’m willing to go wherever you want, although I suspect I already know that answer. But you don’t want to have any more children, with me or anyone else. I already know that, Thomas Pearce. Do you think I’m thick-skulled? Now then. That’s a great promise you’re asking of me, a great sacrifice and one I’ll not swear to—”
He interrupted, “It’s not reasonable to ask, I know that. You’d make a fine mother—”
She said, “For the moment, you’re work enough. Now, what do you have to show me?”
He stood and paced about the room not looking at her. Then he stopped and studied her and his face sagged and it was the only time she came close to seeing him cry. She remained against the sink, hands laced before her.
He leaned over the table and pulled open the rucksack and drew out a sheaf of paper and spread it over the table. He looked at her backed against the sink and said, “You know I didn’t bring any paint. All hope was to draw well. But last week I went down to Dorn Brothers and found a tablet of typing paper and a child’s set of watercolors. Come over and see what I’ve done. It’s awful and better than anything I’ve ever done. But come look.”
LATER, WHEN SHE counted back she realized Beth had not been conceived there but a month later
in Vermont just about the time they were married by a justice of the peace—a term she found strangely consoling, as if a more than adequate stand-in for a priest. No one from New York was present or even aware and so they stood with Lydia Pearce behind them and the town clerk as witness on a hot September day, repairing to the grand house afterward for a quiet dinner and champagne, as she twisted the gold band with its three demure and perfect diamonds, wondering briefly what ring he’d presented to Celeste in New York with Lydia in England and thought it likely had been something inexpensive, the sort of thing a very young man and woman would find all to be necessary and then Lydia made a blessing toast and Mary Margaret Pearce watched her fine husband reenter life.
* * *
THE TELEPHONE RANG as it had incessantly and largely ignored all evening and Mary Margaret rose to answer it, leaving Hewitt alone with the boulder of his father’s death and unknown history in his lap. He was eighteen years old and his father was dead and his mother had enlisted him in her thorough undertaking of managing this death, and he knew this was wrong but believed he must trust his mother was correct in her judgment. That once more they would all step into familiar roles in the days ahead and the alternative was unimaginable. And so first glimpsed the difference between truth and compassionate deceit. Beth would be wild with her grief and his mother would be the public face of the family and Hewitt would be the rock of his father’s seed and so the only place his sister might turn to hurl her grief and he would be silent.
Then headlights swept the side of the house and it could’ve been most anyone, any of a number of people including some who’d certainly been trying to telephone since dusk but because he was eighteen and because throughout all of this long night into morning he’d been tracking the time and miles he knew exactly who it was.
He went down the hall and past the kitchen where his mother was on the telephone and stepped into a soft raining October dark on the porch with the yard light and the dun-colored Plymouth sedan came to a stop and he went down the steps into the circle of rain-streaked light and she stood from the car, her hair falling loose and white in the light down onto her flannel shirt, her new jeans tucked into Frye boots and he went down to her and held her tightly as she tugged him even closer and she was now more than ever all of his life and he snuffled his nose through her hair down into her neck and he was alive and they stood in the rain until she breathed his name and tilted her head back. His life was in his arms, come to him and surrounding him, completing him. And the rain came down.
THERE HAD NEVER been a studio inside the house but one built into the old sugarhouse up the hill. Thomas took breakfast with them and then up the hill to work and back for lunch, then back up to work. But rare days, in all seasons he would of a whim it seemed, declare he was taking the day or the afternoon and this might be as ordinary as father and mother and children working in the gardens together or hiking up through the woods with the satchel of field guides and binoculars and small jeweler’s magnifying glass. Summer afternoons they might picnic high in the old fragrant pastures already growing over with black raspberry and young cherry and alder or in winter they’d strap on snowshoes and head up into the woods, hiking high while the twilight built in the valley below and slowly rose to meet them as they descended in the pale amber light that threw shadows of blue and gold and purple in the woods around them. Beth usually needed coaxing to go along. But for Hewitt it was as if the love of his parents caused the black-eyed Susans to bloom or the crows and indigo buntings and bobolinks and drumming partridge back in the woods, the unfurling ferns beside and swarms of tadpoles within the small pools of the downhill brook—as if these things and all more came as a gift, a sideways glimpse of beauty and peace.
There were rules. The only one inviolate never ever to bother or even approach the old sugarhouse studio while their father was working. He made it easy for them. A sap bucket, rusted evenly as if made that way and with holes broken through the bottom would hang from a nail on the shut door when his father was working. Crude letters in white paint on the side of the bucket facing out declared NO.
Most other infractions were detailed at the end of the day, explanations demanded and offered, and that was that. Their father understood they already knew they had done wrong and only expected them to comprehend and verbalize their transgressions. And in this way the brother and sister learned that right and wrong were not merely a caprice of adults. But an innate understanding they held within themselves.
Which they not only might but should tap. That they should consider actions and consequences. And if Thomas Pearce was harder on Beth it seemed to Hewitt as a child that his sister deserved it, even was responsible and seemed to know it. As he grew older he thought each had the same temper and brought it out in the other. It took much longer for him to realize how one-sided from the beginning that contest of wills had been. Hewitt in the pale June starlight with that quarter moon hiding in the trees as he sat on the Farmall before the ruins of the sugarhouse was not sure he had truly absorbed this lesson. But like all generations he’d taken the wisdom of the elders and smote it to his own needs. And produced therefore his own code. He felt quite sure if his father were alive they would quibble over fine points but not waste time on the larger outlooks. Yes he was quite sure of that. As much as you can know a man twenty and more years dead.
All that remained of the sugarhouse was the chimney and the brick arch. His father had left the structure intact as a working place, building a table over the evaporator pans atop the firebox and against the solid north wall a pair of drafting tables but opening up the woodshed so he had a space for stretched canvases and shelves and tables and paints and solvents and an odd assortment of items that struck his fancy. The only windows were a single pair of six over sixes and these in the south wall which was not ideal but had never seemed to bother his father. And for many years, with not a one of his family knowing, once he began work on a canvas he brought all his sketches and studies down to the house to store in the map files. Not for any sense of the future but because once the paint began to go onto the canvas he no longer had interest or desire to view the studies. Because the painting was always a new thing, regardless of how much thought or rough ideas came first. And once that first line of paint, thick or thin or outlining went upon the canvas, the canvas owned the end result. There was no turning back. This method was not so much a secret as something he simply did not speak of. Throughout the years in Vermont he refused all interviews. Because he would not, most likely could not, speak of how he arrived at those layers of paint and how they built toward the closest he could come to his original, never-realized idea. It was the mystery and he was smart enough by trial if nothing else to not attempt to explain.
Because there was always the risk of losing it. Not necessarily through attempted explanation but that couldn’t be discounted. His father held it tight.
Hewitt sat on the tractor. It was late and he was cold and the chimney reared up straight and true among the giant sugar maples. That little moon was hidden in the hilltop, lost in the leaves, the stars and the breath he sent out as smoke toward them and whatever deeper mystery they held. Remembering the fine thoughtless almost gleeful blaze the sugarhouse threw up as it burned. He was very tired and it was late. There was work to do. There was a fucked-up girl gone missing. Or just gone. He cranked the tractor, swallowed the last stale beer from the bottle and went down the hill toward the one faint window-light of home.
FOR THREE DAYS he worked first light till dark on the gates. The first day was slow going as always but as they took their new form he could not stop. He was on fire and breathless. Jessica was receding. He missed her company, then decided he didn’t. The rows of hammered ovals slowly marched across one gate, then the second. He was only another stop on her road, perhaps a bit of kindness that would linger, that might go out into the world with her. Even beaten flat the round stock was finer than the heavy woven strapping and even heavier framework. And the effect was e
xactly what he’d envisioned—one of physical and visual balances. Well, shit, he still missed her. The ovals set within the squares appeared delicate, almost as if they could be lifted free. His sleep was broken. The gates were in everything he thought or felt or saw. To the point that he balanced an actual egg in the pritchel hole of the smaller anvil. To look at as he worked. Not a guide so much as a counterpoint.
On the fourth morning he was done but for the four iron eggs to top the gates when he heard the car come off the road and into the farmyard. He had a length of one-inch round stock heating in the fire from which he would begin the slow process of thickening and tapering for the oval that would become the first of the eggs. He moved it to the edge of the fire to keep it warm and went up the stairs to the farmyard. Just in time to see the otherworldly Volkswagen drift through and with a churn of tires begin the uphill climb through the fields. The hay baled and gone. But she didn’t stop there and the car went off into the woods and out of sight.
He stood a moment, annoyed. Four days gone and she came in as if she owned the place. He gazed at the treetops on the ridge, still in the morning air. The fleeting thought came to crank the Farmall or even walk up to make sure she was alright. But he was rankled by her assumption of welcome and then it came to him she might be hiding. Perhaps because it meshed with his own plans he decided if she was indeed hiding from something, he would doubtless find out soon enough. If it was serious. And the best thing would be for him to be at work. The prospect of drawing out and tapering that ovoid sphere, slight hammer blow by blow, was a challenge he’d been anticipating.
He went to the house and standing up ate a sandwich. Then back across the yard with a short glance up the hill. All quiet. No smoke, no campfire but no need for one on this warm day. In the smithy he opened the lower doors and pumped the big bellows twice and set the rod back into the hearth to heat. With his back to the fire he ran a hand over the hammers snug in their loops. Searching for the right one to bring that onion toward an egg. The hen hammer. Light and small-faced but with the face wider than long. A mild rectangle rather than a square. He lifted it and turned to check the color of the bulge in the rod. Not quite. But soon.