by Jeffrey Lent
Hewitt stood up, half his sandwich still on his plate. He said, “Don’t be an idiot. He was a barn cat. And he and I watched out for each other. In our own ways. I’m not wanting lectures from you. But in an hour or so, if you want to hike up, I’ll put you to work.” And picked up the remains of his sandwich and stalked from the house.
By the time he saw her walking through the woodlot with a thermos jug, he was feeling pretty good. He’d cut up an ash brought down by an ice and wind storm the winter past, and a rock maple collapsed from the same storm. The ash was solid, its death a result of the tree forking some twenty feet up and once half of the crown went the stress was too great for the rest of the tree. The maple was another matter—standing dead so most of its smaller limbs had long since given way, leaving the huge rough bole topped with thick stubs of limbs. Probably only half the wood was salvageable, the rest punked or rotten. Still and all he had a pretty good-sized pile to split and was ready for the water he’d forgotten in his pique.
He’d saved a thick round of the ash to use as a chopping block and sat on that with his feet and knees spread, his jeans littered with sawdust and oil stains from the chainsaw and watched her approach. She was dressed for work and silently handed him the thermos and stood watching while he tipped it back and drank, the water so cold he couldn’t drink as quickly as he wanted, the cold almost paralyzing his throat. He capped the jug and said, “Just what I needed. Thanks. Time I get this split up, we’ll have us a load. You can start stacking the small stuff in the spreader, just keep an eye on me and don’t get too close. Some of these buggers, when they split, can send a piece far and fast enough to break an arm or take out an eye. And I’ve got to watch for myself. Okay?”
“Sorry about the cat,” she said.
“Yeah, well. Let’s work a while. It’s taken the piss out of me.”
SPLITTING WOOD’S A CURIOUS enterprise. Each round has slightly different properties, so each reacts differently to the axe, and the axeman, after splitting two or three thousand chunks has a pretty good idea of what to expect. Still there are surprises—the greatest danger for himself as well as Jessica being that wild hurtling piece that refused to simply fall into the growing pile around the block. Twice his shins took a sharp rap from such pieces. But mostly the pile grew and from time to time he’d pause to push away the split wood building around his legs and roll close more of the big rounds.
When the splitting was done, they both took a wordless water break. Jessica’s face was red from the work and the golden light fell around them in the woods and mixed with the smell of the freshly opened wood so the silence between them was easy. The beauty of the day needed no comment. With both stacking, the split wood began to fill the spreader fast. They’d almost finished the first load when the incessant beeping of a car horn came up to them. They couldn’t see the farmyard from this spot but the sound clearly came from there.
“What’s that about?” Jessica asked.
“Trouble.” Hewitt was setting the chainsaw and gas can, jug of bar oil and the axe atop the load. Last thing he grabbed up the thermos. Climbing on to the Farmall he said, “Come on, hop up on the bar behind the seat. Hold on tight.”
She looked up, still on the ground. “I’ll run down. Nobody knows we’re up here.”
“Whoever it is will hear the tractor, you’d let me start it.”
She looked away through the trees toward the sound of the horn, then back at Hewitt. And took off at a serious lope, a good pace for the woods.
Hewitt started the tractor and cursed, “Fucking girl.” The tractor lurched forward and he could only get up into second until he was clear of the woods. He had no idea who would be sounding so persistent an alarm or what for. He’d already scanned the sky and it was free of smoke.
In the upper reach of the pasture the lane improved and he tried third gear but the load was rocking even after he idled down so he dropped into second again. Then cleared the rise of land and could see the farmyard and recognized Priscilla Warren’s red Wagoneer. Pea, as everyone called her after her size, was the rural mail carrier and although it had only occurred a few times over the years he guessed she had a piece of registered mail, something she needed his signature upon. She was trying to save him the slow tractor ride to the post office.
Jessica was bounding through the lower reach of the hayfield and into the yard. She slowed, stopped and walked on. Pea was out of her truck, kneeling over something on the ground. And once again he didn’t know what had come upon them this afternoon but knew it was not good. He saw Jessica suddenly spurt the last fifty feet and also go down on to her knees.
There was no way for him to travel faster. He could’ve shut the tractor down and locked the foot brakes hard and chocked the wheels of the loaded spreader and run himself but it would save little time. So he drove along and pulled around on to level ground near the barn before he shut down the tractor.
Tom lay dead cradled in Jessica’s arms. Jessica bent over the cat, her body a question mark that had lost interest in its answer, a low croon coming from her that was not a cry and not meant to soothe the passing but from some deep pit, a low humming keen. It was not a good day for cats.
Hewitt went down on one knee and placed a hand lightly on Jessica’s shoulder. He looked over at Pea and saw a smear of blood on one hand, blood from Tom’s mouth most likely when she’d picked him up from the road. Hewitt already knew the story. But he patted Jessica’s shoulder twice, his eyes on Pea as he tilted his head and then rose. Together they went around to the other side of her truck.
Hewitt liked Pea. Ten years his senior, the mother of three children whose husband some years ago had left to join a Buddhist monastery in the Catskills. The story was he’d told Pea to hold on, he’d return a better man for all of them. To which Pea responded she’d empty her deer rifle into him next time she saw him and his Masters at the monastery better be prepared to assist him in his vow of poverty with child support, or she’d sue them to the last inch of their tidy nonprofit status.
She said, “I’m sorry as can be about the cat. I was just slowing up toward your mailbox when he broke out the brush and streaked cross right in front of the truck. I didn’t see him but a second but I heard the thump. He was dead before he even knew it.”
“It’s all right, Pea. It happens. Thanks for blowing the horn. It would’ve been harder if we’d just found the cat on the road.”
“I know. She all right?”
“She will be. Thanks, Pea. You already got yourself at least a half hour behind.”
She said, “I never made it to the box. You want your mail?”
He said, “Naw. Just stick it in the box tomorrow.”
She stepped up into the truck and leaned out the window. “Hewitt. Tell her I’m sorry for me.”
* * *
HE BURIED THE second cat of the day a few feet away from the first. Jessica silently refused to come, retreating to the house. This time when the hole was dug and the wrapped cat rested, he paused thinking of the short life of the cat, rescued from Emmett’s and teased back to his playful dominating self. A cat to be reckoned with. A lovely cat.
When he came back around the barn from the orchard the door-yard was empty. As he stood the front screen door popped open and Jessica was outside, running. Coming toward him. Her face a clamor of anxiety and terror spilling up and across it. She ran past him out the driveway on to the road. He followed and stood watching as she fell to hands and knees working up one side of the road and down the other. She was pushing deep into the brush and brambles along the roadside and down to the brook on the farm side of the road. Then she’d climb back and go up the road fifteen feet and start all over again.
She was searching for Rufus. He went toward her, pushing his way into a black raspberry thicket, ducked low toward her agitated stream of kittykittykittykittykitty the rapid chanting a lament.
They worked together both sides of the road a quarter mile up from the driveway and then walked down and did the same th
e other side of the drive. When they abandoned the roadside search and walked back up the road in the fast drooping afternoon, he said, “We’ll drive up to Emmett’s. Could be they were trying to go back there.”
Jessica was silent. In the driveway Hewitt got behind the wheel of the VW and she slid into the passenger side. Backing around, Hewitt told himself fuck the law, he was the one in shape to drive.
There was not much to be found or seen at the Kirby place. The house was wrapped with yellow police tape and someone had covered all the ground floor doors and windows with plywood sheeting. Together they made a slow circuit of the house calling quietly for the cat. But there was nothing. Except the abyss of Emmett Kirby.
He drove them home. She asked nothing and he said nothing. He only prayed Rufus would return from wherever he was hiding.
He pulled into the driveway and parked by the barn. Jessica sat looking out the window on her side, drifting deep within. And he thought I’ll follow until I hear the crack and then do my best to jump down and be there to catch her, to break her fall.
Jessica trailing, they went through the dusk to the house, darker inside than out. Hewitt turned on lights in the kitchen and continued through the pantry and office and up the stairs and through all the upper rooms, even the spare bedrooms, lighting them up, leaving the doors open. He was heading toward the top of the stairs when he heard a small choked-off scream from below and went at dangerous speed down the stairs into the living room, dark still until as he passed it his hand hit the overhead switch. Jessica was on the couch, Rufus held tight to her chest.
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.
SHE 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 eve
r? 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.”