Authors: Jeffrey Lent
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.
Gently Hewitt explained the ironwork before them was complete, a finished thing that could not be altered.
He said, “Tell you what. Keep your check for now. Have a good contractor measure your stairs and I’ll send you the plans, which have every dimension noted on them. Then you both look things over. The railing should fit if it’s a standard set of stairs. But if you want them and alterations need to be done then that work has to be done in your house before we can install the railing. How’s that sound?” And he grinned.
So it was and so it would be. The check sent in the mail the next week along with a note explaining that it would be fall before the railing could be installed. The man had the grace to add a note saying he fully expected to pay for the transportation and installation of the railing. Hewitt sent back a postcard with the single word message
“Fine” on the back. When the call finally came that the stairs were ready Hewitt again gathered a couple of helpers and made the trip to Putney and spent four days installing the railing, putting his crew and himself up in a motel. And at the end had again the satisfaction of announcing that his price covered all contingencies, including installation. It wasn’t that the man couldn’t part with another couple of thousand dollars. Christ knew what he’d paid to have his house altered, his stairs altered, to hold the beautiful railing. Hewitt knew the money out of his own pocket for the time and help of installation would come back to him many times over. And he also knew the stair railing was the last job he’d do on spec. Ever after he would have measurements of his own making before he even began a job.
It was a fine summer. While waiting, while the staircasing was still on view, he had at least a half-dozen job requests come in. He turned down all but two.
And all the while Amber seemed steady shoulder to shoulder with him. While he was working more than ever before during their time together there was still plenty of time for late summer picnic dinners high up on the hill in the dusk or in moonlight drinking wine and more than once chasing her down into the tall pasture grass and those summer clothes coming off as if they were made for that and nothing more. Or the long lazy mornings lying in bed on her days off talking over the small fortunes and misfortunes of those around them and even now and then nudging upon themselves but in a gentle laughing way, a way Hewitt took as loving. Because it was.
The long days he was working she went about her own business. She had a riding horse, a big legged, big chested Percheron Thorough-bred cross that she moved over from her parents and installed in the barn. She brought in a pair of geese Hewitt didn’t care for because the gander ambushed him daily at dawn as he was making his way to the forge. And there was goose shit around the barns and in the yard but a hard scuffing of boots against gravel and dew-wet grass pretty much took care of that. It was a good time.
Then came the morning when he’d been up late and she’d gone to bed early because she had to work in the morning. Still in bed she roused him and was up on all fours over him as he fought to come awake. His eyes fighting the sleep tugging him back down but at that moment he thought he was still a good partner. Blinking hard, expecting some mild directive for the day.
She said, “Hewitt. I got to ask you a question.”
“What?”
“Are you ever going to ask me to marry you? Or do you just plan to go along the way we been?”
And he rolled away, pulling a pillow to burrow his head. He said, “Christ, Amber, don’t do this to me right now.” When it was quiet too long above him, he said, “Amber, I don’t want to fuck up my life. Give it a break, okay? Isn’t this good? We’ll talk tonight you want.”
When he did get up at noon it was not a genius that saw her drawers rifled in the bedroom and the moderate destruction of crockery tossed into the woodshed. All of which he’d slept through. He had to respect that all she’d broken was junk anyway. It was the gesture she was after, not true affliction. First thing he checked the barn. The big horse Ben was in his stall. So she wasn’t really gone.
He spent the afternoon sitting gazing into the forge fire. Trying to decide what to say when she came back that evening. But his brain was a loop. He wanted things just as they were. It was a long afternoon.
Which turned into a long night. He didn’t eat or drink and sometime well after midnight went to bed. Thinking still he might wake in the morning and find her beside him. There was a long time of resolve to marry her. Which he knew would dissolve face to face. It was very much not clear if he was fucking up or being true to something. To Emily, he finally admitted.
When he woke midmorning there was no sign of her. His first thought was she just needed some time. Before his first coffee he went out to feed her horse. Who had been there the night before the last time he wandered around the yard and barns waiting for her to drive
in. But Ben was gone. The stall door was shut tight and the saddle and pad and bridle were gone as well as the big horse’s halter and lead rope. A sack of grain remained and the hay. He went out into the yard and stood and could see where the big horse had disturbed the early fall dew on the tall grass going up the hill.
He went down into the ground, down into the forge and built up heat and spent the day doing bad work. That got worse as the day went on. So bad that he quit before dark and repaired to the house to sit slumped in one of the chairs in the red room gazing without seeing his father’s paintings. Wanting something to come through. A futile hopeless effort. Except that after a couple of hours of this he entered his father’s work. Perhaps, except as a child which might or might not count, the first time entirely sober and fractured.
Not surprisingly this did not help. The work was frightening—the crude hewn figures of workers both urban and rural set against black or brown or dead green and with a piece, a shadow, or just an intimation of machinery all different but all of a scale, more an implication than concrete substance, the faces and bodies contorted not simply with effort but fatigue ingrained so deeply they drooped even in the sculptural muscle ever present and always mirthless below their grinding, the palette dull with rust or looming machinery, the workmen’s faces and their clothes, but then would be the single thick bar of lime green or bright yellow that crept along one edge of the machines or fell diagonally across the men. These slashes of color almost more violent than the silent cry they cut across. And never, not once and it was here the brilliance of the work lay, were the slashes of color allegorical to any but the simplest eye, for in each usage, studied long enough, the organic origin of that color became clear. Thomas Pearce painted what he saw. The old family joke, which originated in one of the few interviews his father ever agreed to give, was he painted the way he did because he was nearsighted but too vain to wear glasses. Thomas Pearce loved to point this quote out as the best reason to never talk to the press.
Hewitt finally pushed up from the sunken leather chair and went to bed but his sleep was splintered and if he slept at all it was in spurts lasting no more than ten or fifteen minutes.
It was three months, the new year, before he saw Amber again.
Although she’d left the geese. Which he butchered and roasted for a decadent and dismal Christmas dinner with his mother and Walter.
H
E CAME UP
the drive at full throttle and with his foot holding the clutch down shut off the tractor and let it glide up the last of the incline and on to the flat before the immaculate house. A log cabin whose logs Hewitt noted were far too symmetrical to be merely cut and peeled trees. And took a last hit of the Coke and reminded himself to allow people to live other than he did. That he was here for advice not anything else.
Amber was on the deck to meet him. In shorts and a T-shirt, all exposed skin sporting an even dark tan. Something of a marvel this early in the year yet he routinely saw women with these tans well before the end of June, which was creeping up. They recognized the short summer season right from the beginning and embraced it, absorbed it, as if their bodies might store the short blast of summer heat and remember it through the long dark cold months. Her hair was pulled back and bound up on her nape. To allow the sun as much of her as it could have. Of course there was her work—coinciding with their breakup she’d left her job and mostly kept the books for her husband’s well-drilling empire but worked summers part-time at a large organic vegetable farm over the hill toward Bethel.
Amber looked good, standing waiting as he walked up the steps to the deck. There were Adirondack chairs and a table with an umbrella over it and on the table was a pitcher of lemonade and a pair of glasses.
“Amber,” he greeted her.
She came and touched his cheek with dry tight lips and said, “Pete called me from the store. To warn me he thought you might be headed
up here. I said Yes indeed I believe he’s on his way but I hadn’t seen you since eighteen hundred and froze to death, or so it seemed, so it’d be good to talk to you. I figured there idn’t a thing to keep from Nort anyhow and so best out with the truth. Nort’s a good shit, you know that. And he’s got no reason and never will have, not to trust me. But Pete’s a trial. Jeezum, Norton’s been gone three days up to the Northeast Kingdom and I’ve started talking to the plants. You look a little peaked, Hewitt. You want to set down and talk about it?”
“Goddamn,” Hewitt said. “It’s good to see you, Amber.”
“Don’t,” she said. “Set and drink your lemonade and talk to me. You get a grace period, Hewitt. So what is it?”
They sat across the table. And he told her in nearly full detail what his last couple of weeks had been like, leaving out only the insertion of Jessica into his life. Which had no bearing on his bafflement and anger at himself.
Amber was quiet a time. Then said, “It’s funny but I always sort of doubted she was real. I mean, I knew you’d met this girl when you were both pretty much kids. But I always wondered if you were using her as a way to give yourself some distance from other women. Sorry if that bothers you, but it’s the sort of thing any woman would wonder.”
“Yup,” he said.
“Oh my God,” she said. “You are such a moron. I mean for Christ sake Hewitt, her husband was dead a couple weeks and instead of handing her some flowers, saying how sorry you were, you backed right up to her front door and unloaded a pile of horseshit. Jesus, Hewitt.”
He said, “You know, Amber? I’m kinda aware of that.”
“Sorry,” she said. “Look, the key thing is she called you. After you’d been a jerk and then tucked tail for home. She called you. A goodbye-forever-asshole sort of call, but think about it. She’d already told you off. And you left. End of story, right?”
“Right.”
“But then she calls you to tell you what you already know. What she’s already said.”
“Yeah but she was pissed. I figure she wanted to make sure I understood that. I figure she doesn’t want anything close to a repeat of my stupid self. I figure she was driving the nail home.”
There was a long pause.
Then Amber said, “Hewitt, for a reasonably intelligent person you are dumb as shit about women.”
“Lack of practice I guess.”
She pointed an index finger at him. “Don’t you fuck with me.” Then she said, “Women don’t drive nails—they let the man figure out he’s already done that to himself.” She paused again. “Go home and go to work. Keep busy. I know the part of you that’s willing to coast. So go home and pound iron. And forget about everything else. Okay? You wanted advice, you took much of a day to bother me for it and that’s what you get. That and a glass of lemonade.”
“Hold on,” he said.
“Oh for Christ sake Hewitt, buck up. Get strong.”
Amber stood. Hewitt did too. He said, “I’m strong. I’m strong enough. Hell, I was strong enough not to marry you when it would’ve been the easy thing to do.”
She shook her head. “There is nothing sadder than a man angry over what he doesn’t understand. I’m telling you what you need to do. But you’re missing the rest of it.”
He was quiet a time. Then he said, “So you’re telling me there’s a chance, an outside chance, that sometime, I’ll hear from her again.”
Amber shook her head and said, “I know you, Hewitt. Don’t sit by the phone. Just because she did one thing she didn’t need to doesn’t mean she doesn’t regret it and will ever do it again. I remember your dad. I remember going in the sugarhouse one afternoon with you and watching him work. I remember those strange paintings he made.
He worked all the time, didn’t he? Don’t be so goddamn precious Hewitt.”
“Precious. Right. That sums it up. You know, I appreciate the talk, Amber. And I have to say, best I can figure Norton’s a saint.” And he turned and walked off the deck which was an architectural device he hated and crunched gravel on his way to the tractor.
She was barefoot and he in boots and so he didn’t hear her but felt her hand touch and slip off his shoulder as he climbed on to the Farmall. Where he stopped and looked down at her. Distress a contraction of her face. Hewitt pushed the clutch in and with the other foot clamped hard the brake. His finger against but not pressing the ignition button. He said, “Sorry, Amber. That wasn’t called for.”