by Jeffrey Lent
Hewitt was pressing the phone so hard against his head that his ear hurt. His arm ached, his head ached. His heart was not pumping, best as he could tell. The room swimming around him. The silence, the faint electric crackle. And only then realized she was done. Waiting for him.
Finally he said, “I never intended to do that to you. It just came out. It’s why I came home. To leave you be.”
“I wish you’d done that to start with. I have to go now. I have to get dressed and go to work. Goodbye, Hewitt. And good luck.”
The line went dead. After a time he slowly put the receiver back in the cradle, but stood looking down at the phone. He hated the telephone.
“YOU TRYING TO figure out how a telephone works or do you like your bacon burned up and filling the house with smoke? I mean, it’s your house and all but I’m sure as hell not going to eat that pig meat so you want I should toss the pan out back to cool off or what?”
Jessica in the doorway, wearing his old sweatpants and a large denim shirt loose over the pants.
Hewitt scraped the crusted bacon into the trash, rinsed the pan and used a copper brush to clean the pan under cold water before setting it back on the stove to dry.
He turned back to her and said, “That coffee’s fresh. I’m going to be gone most of the morning. Is Walter coming to work on the Bug with you?”
“Best I know. The car wasn’t all wrapped up like a ugly Christmas present I could drive you.”
“I appreciate it. But remember, I did just fine before you came along.” And grinned against misinterpretation.
She said, “You know what Hewitt? Since I’ve been here that evidence is not so strong. Or maybe it’s me.” She seemed to brighten with this declaration. “Shitfire, it wouldn’t be the first time I was the one blamed for things going wrong.”
“You’re fine. You’re the most fun I’ve had in a long time. Don’t you worry about that.”
She paused, taking this in, her face showing slight doubt but he was used to that. Then she said, “So, you walking? Or hitchhiking?”
“Hell no. Some lunatic might pick me up. I’ll take the tractor. Where I’m going, it’ll get the job done.”
She tipped her head to one side. She was waking. A grin straight from Puck popped over her face and she said, “You should get you a horse, Hewitt. You could sneak up on people and not stink up the air like that tractor exhaust.”
“Thanks,” he said. “But I’ve got an old barn cat to watch out for, and myself and other stray humans and I’d hate to think of an animal counting on me.”
“Wouldn’t that be terrible. To have some living thing count on you.”
It was time to go. He walked over and kissed her forehead before she had a chance to pull her head away and said, “Walter shows up, tell him I said he can’t hit worth shit. I’m all but healed.”
He pulled the Farmall around to the five-hundred-gallon farm tank and filled it up. Technically he wasn’t entitled to the agricultural gas but the fuel company didn’t care or question and Hewitt felt no guilt over duping the state and feds from their taxes. Now, filling the tractor and fresh from Emily’s succinct comment about his maturity or lack thereof, he wondered if this stubbornness was only another manifestation of that condition or, as he’d long believed, an appropriate response to inappropriate action. What the fuck. He liked driving the tractor.
He had the two miles to go to the village, a brief stop there and then near another four miles. All told a round trip of a dozen miles, perhaps a bit more. The old tractor clattered along, the spread narrow front tires wobbling and the steering wheel shuddered and called for a firm grip.
He rounded the bend in the road that followed Pearce Brook and came into the cluster of homes, church, single store and post office that was Lympus Village. His immediate destination the outside phone booth attached to the store. This call he could not have made from home—it had been too early and then there was Jessica. Not that she should matter but he figured just because she was living at his house didn’t entitle her to more than she already knew about him, which was plenty.
It took a moment to register the county cruiser parked nose out by the store. Where the deputy could see traffic coming and going. The speed limit in the village was thirty-five but only tourists and old people observed this. Lympus was not a destination but a straight stretch on the road to somewhere else. Hewitt atop the Farmall was well under the limit but cursed silently, avoiding eye contact with the deputy, Pete Snow.
Hewitt slowed and even remembered to use the small fender-mounted light that indicated he was turning in. He passed the cruiser and a sedan and pickup parked before the store and came to a stop before the phone booth. A small dilemma; he had no desire for Pete to stroll up while he was on the phone. So he went into the store and bought a Coke and six donuts made fresh that morning. Then slapped out the screen door and saw Pete walking slowly around the tractor, as if admiring it. It wasn’t candied up like some of the old rigs that spent the year under a tarp in a barn and were brought out for parades and the Tunbridge World’s Fair each fall—just a well-maintained serviceable rig with everything original intact and pushing sixty years old.
Hewitt stood reading the various notices tacked to the outer wall of the store. Services offered included butchering, backhoe and bush-hog work, babysitting by a girl last he’d seen was being babysat herself, massage, rabbits for sale, a friendly male llama in need of a good home, Barred Rock pullets ready to go, yoga classes, contra dancing. A pair of snowmobiles (used one season!). And so on. Pete was still at the tractor, seated on one of the short narrow little front tires. His butt bloomed either side but then again, Hewitt told himself, if I had to pack myself into polyester each day and cruise the county roads I’d likely spread a bit too. And Pete, with the unspoken mandate to leave people be as much as possible, to overlook all but the accidents and overt violations of the law did a pretty good job at this. Unless he didn’t like you. And Hewitt wasn’t quite sure how Pete felt about him. An attitude likely intentional, to keep Hewitt off balance.
He jogged down the three steps and came to a stop before the deputy.
“Pete.”
“Hewitt.” A pause, then, “Nice weather idn’t it?”
“Keeping us all busy.”
Pete rubbed his chin. “Heard Bill got the first cut off your place. Nice hay he said.”
“It was. He got the timing just right.”
Pete patted the tractor tire. He said, “So. You out farming this morning, Hewitt?”
This was bait like a fat night crawler. But unless he was intoxicated, Hewitt had as much right as anyone to drive the tractor anywhere he wanted to. Eight-year-old boys routinely moved tractors, towing equipment, from place to place, using the roads as needed. And Hewitt knew Pete was likely just spending time. The problem was that the pending phone call, and hopefully the visit about to be made, was not one Pete would like. For purely personal reasons. So he played along.
“I’m heading up Duffy Hill. Heard Crosby Duffy had a trailer to sell might fit this rig. You know Crosby, he won’t answer the phone much more than I will. So the only thing’s to drive up, hope he’s home and hope the trailer fits.”
“What’re you needing a trailer for, Hewitt?”
“Well, I thought I could haul my dreams around in it. Goddamn Pete, you looking to bust me or just give me a hard time?”
“Curious is all. Trying to keep the peace.”
“I’m peaceful Pete. But my sugarbush is filled up with old trees and my firewood’s low. I thought I might clean it up over the summer. That trailer would come in handy.”
“There idn’t nobody sugaring that anymore is there?”
“Well, I thought I got it cleaned up perhaps somebody would come in and tap. Hate to see those trees just standing there. Big buggers.”
“I sugar a bit myself.”
“I know it. Tell you what, come fall why don’t you drive up and take a walk around. A man could run pipeline and
set up a gathering tank and haul sap out of there would make a deaf man sing. Now, you’ll excuse me, I’m gonna try Crosby one more time on the phone here and then get on up there. Even if he idn’t there I guess I can find the trailer and make sure it’d work so I don’t waste more time.”
And Hewitt turned away from Pete Snow. Praying Pete would take the hint and at least go back to sit in the cruiser.
Pete said, “Hewitt.”
Hewitt turned. Pete said, “That trailer of Crosby’s don’t do you any good, call me. I got one might fit this old rig. Needs new tires but it’s good to go otherwise.”
Hewitt studied the deputy. “Thanks Pete. I’ll let you know.”
And turned then with clear purpose and strode to the public phone. Which was not a booth the way they used to be but a machine with a minimum of hood and siding. Privacy depended on who was standing around. He didn’t look back as he fished for coins in his pocket but he could hear Pete moving away on the gravel of the parking lot. He slipped the quarter into the slot and dialed the number and turned a bit sideways, enough to see Pete settle into the cruiser.
Hewitt turned back and leaned in tight to the phone and waited through three rings and she picked up.
“Amber,” he said. “Can you talk?”
“What do you want?”
He said. “I need to see you.”
“I’m a mess.”
“So am I.”
Another pause. Then she said, “Where are you?”
“The store.”
“You want me to pick you up?”
He didn’t even look to see if the cruiser was still there. It didn’t matter. “No. I’m on the tractor. It’ll take me a bit.”
“Oh frig it. Come on up. I guess you know the way.” The line went dead.
He ate a donut and climbed back on the tractor, set the bag of donuts back behind him in the toolbox and cracked the Coke. Reversed the Farmall and headed south out of town. The only question was if Pete decided to follow him. But there were three miles to go before he had to fake left on to Duffy Hill Road or go another quarter mile for the long driveway that led up through the woods to the log house built by Pete’s brother Norton and his wife after years of pursuit, Amber Potwin.
She had been Hewitt’s first girlfriend, a designation that began when they were both eight and continued sporadically and with significant interruptions until finally eight years ago she married Norton. Two years before that she’d moved in with Hewitt and they’d settled into a domestic routine that for a time was sweet.
Amber was so well known to him—he could wake with frost flowers scrambled on the windowglass and watch her sleeping beside him and still see the girl in her shorts and sleeveless blouse wading with him in stagnant snowmelt pools near the brook, her auburn hair trickling past her nose and her bright eyes watching him, a mayonnaise jar filled with tadpoles, the girl more than delighted to help the boy move these creatures from a drying death to the wealth of life in the flowing brook pools. And later those first tentative grapplings at eleven or twelve, sitting on the hillside when he put his arm around her and she turned her face to him and they kissed and then the frightening surge in his own shorts of erection. A year later when she began to swell her blouse and their kissing had advanced considerably there was the day they rolled in the tall meadow grass and Hewitt was on top of her and he said, “I want you,” and she’d responded, “Take me,” and then both lay kissing, the words uttered not their own but from books or the movies, not only unsure how humans proceeded but also knowing they were in drama, their passion was play, those words were in some way practice and everything else they were doing was close enough. And then finally, after she had dated a boy two grades ahead for a school year they were released back into their summer dreams and one night with purloined cans of beer and a pack of Old Golds they’d been up in the meadow and Hewitt was determined then to break through to what seemed the only thing he did not know and Amber was sighing and groaning in his ear as they kissed and writhing below him in ways that made clear she expected more also and part of him was angry because she’d moved beyond him. So when he sat back on his knees and went to work on the button and zipper of her jeans he was not surprised but exulted that she raised her hips to help him slide down those jeans and when his own were off and he lay upon her probing, she was the one who reached down and introduced him to herself. A short and strange excursion that was not at all what he expected, both less and more and he could not say which or why but he was even then a kind boy and so sat quietly with her afterward as they drank the last warm beer and smoked cigarettes and he did not profess love nor did she. The rest of that summer they met as often as they could and almost always the first thing they did was have sex. There was the remarkable afternoon when his parents were away that Amber came to the house and for the first time they shared a bed, a wondrously grown-up thing to do. Hewitt knew nothing of the sexual workings of women but did know that between one and five that afternoon he came four times with her. Which would prove to be a lifetime achievement.
Hewitt liked to believe he was never quite sure what happened. That year they lived together he began to believe he was inching and sometimes even sliding well into a new life. With a woman known and strong to him. That perhaps Emily was if not forgotten then at least subdued to the past. Beginning to believe in some pure but intricate way he was coming into not a dream-version but an authentic life—one that was not only opening but would continue to do so, an endless rose.
Somewhere around Groundhog Day, when she was working an afternoon shift at the nursing home on a rise of land outside of Sharon, he went for the first time in months out to the forge. It was only later that he was able to backtrack to this moment. But he hadn’t been in the forge since early November when he’d finished a traditional fireplace screen. With the February sun on his back he’d spent an hour shoveling out the bank of snow blocking the door to the forge and then went down and sat in the cold hearth. All the materials from the bricks of the massive forge to the tools to the heavy anvils and swage block and even the packed floor seemed the antithesis of what it should be. That evening he was quiet and remote as they ate the chili and cornbread he’d made for supper. The next day he went back again into the forge and began a marathon session of work that took him through apple-blossom time during which he created an entire stair railing, from newel post on up sixteen risers to the anchor post—the piece the fulcrum of what would become his standard—a delicate balance of precisely aligned elements of weight and air, a seemingly effortless meeting of heaviness and light that both rooted the piece and gave the impression of being built in another age for another undertaking altogether. Gone were the vines and tendrils and leaves and ornamentals. Instead the balance lay in the materials, the only concession to ornamentation hammered buttons that suggested flowers by the cut of chisel work and slight swelling that served to hide the few rivets used—the exception a pair of those same buttons twice the size of the others flat atop the newel and anchor posts. He constructed the entire thing in six sections, each weighing nearly five hundred pounds. In July he loaded the sections into a rented covered truck, the ironwork wrapped in the thick pads moving companies provide, and drove west to the Shelburne Farms museum and craft center. With Walter, Robbie Dutton and Nort Snow, he’d unloaded the pieces and arrayed them standing on the grass, turned to the curator and asked, “Is this something you’d be interested in?”
The man removed his cap and rubbed his bald head and said, “Can you trust me with it for a few days?”
“Why?”
“So I can show it to the people who’ll decide.”
Hewitt shook his hand. Three days later he returned with Amber and found a beautifully constructed staircase in the field before the entrance to the exhibition tent. The work had been done with care and thought equal to the railing—the staircase was freestanding and so was supported by a trusswork of six-by-six and eight-by-eight old beams. Beautiful wood but put together i
n such a way it seemed to be a portion of the guts of a house moved outside. In the same way the steps, the risers were of wide footworn butternut—truly stairs from someplace moved here for the moment. At the top was a sturdy platform of the same wide boards, large enough to hold three or four people. Not that anyone was allowed to climb these stairs—the effort had been solely to showcase the ironwork railing. Which Hewitt went to work assembling on these lovely stairs to nowhere.
These were the eight-thousand-dollar stair railings and the beginning of not only Hewitt’s widespread reputation but also his ability to pick and choose and interpret commissions as he saw fit. Among his other unusual business practices was his refusal to photograph his finished work. He had no portfolio to show potential clients. They either knew his work and trusted him or they’d heard of his work and reputation and gave him a rendering of their best hope and left it to him. He wanted no smooth unblemished cuticle landing middle of a photograph of something made one or three or ten years ago declaring That was it. Because it most certainly was not.
The railings were sold within two weeks of the show’s opening. When Hewitt met the buyer the first thing Hewitt said—disregarding the check in the man’s hand and waiting with shifting feet through the praise that he would never welcome but would learn was part of the process, not wanted by him but needed by the new customer—“Did you measure your stairs to see if the railing will fit?”
Hewitt was not intentionally rude. But through his father he’d learned something of the world, and the power that flits throughout the world and how to not resist but ride that power and he was doing it now. The man’s face said it all. He had a check already made out and this shaggy man in rough stained overalls and a denim work shirt was questioning if he knew what he was doing. The confusion blazed like sunburn across his face and he said nothing, stood holding the check which inexplicably was losing value as he stood.