Authors: Jeffrey Lent
“Okeydoke,” Hewitt said. “Let’s all settle down. It’s no conspiracy against you, Mother. Goddamn it I don’t need prickly women right now.”
“Prickly? I’m not prickly. Maybe I said people are damn fools but I was not including myself.”
Jessica said, “Hewitt, maybe I should take a walk and let you and your mother talk.”
“I don’t think so, girlie,” said Mary Margaret. “Whatever nonsense you’re up to here I want to be able to watch your face when it comes out.”
Jessica halted, a distinct sensation since she was standing still. She said, “Yes. I do believe you’re right. And, to tell the truth, I want to watch you as well.”
“Ah there now. The bee can sting, can she?”
Hewitt set his mug down on the chrome bar along the front of the range with enough force so the handle parted and was still clenched in his hand. “Calm down. The both of you. Let’s get this done with.” He tossed the broken handle into the sink where it clattered in the sudden silence of the room.
In the living room he commanded both to sit and they did, not touching but side by side on the couch. He wouldn’t look at Jessica, not wanting to know if her face was calm or panic rising. He went to the mantel and took down the manila envelope and removed first the photograph of the painting and silently handed it to his mother.
She held it a moment, squinting, and then reached under her sweater and drew out glasses and put them on and studied the photograph. Then placed it on her lap and looking only at Hewitt said, “I’ve never seen this before. But I’ve seen one somewhat like it.”
“The one you’re thinking of Dad gave Grandmother when he visited up here around 1946. When the both of you moved into the house he crated it and left it in the basement. I found it a while ago. It’s hanging in the red room and you must’ve seen it when you were up two years ago.”
She tilted her head to one side, scrutinizing him.
He drew out the other photograph and handed it over.
His mother took her time with this, a deep concentrated study. Only once did she glance up and that time briefly at Jessica beside her and then back to the photo. Her hands held it from below as if it were both precious and alien. Finally she turned it over to see if there was writing across the back or a studio’s mark. Or just to see the reverse side. Then she carefully did not offer the photograph to Hewitt but placed it on the couch faceup between herself and Jessica. She sat looking off a time at the wall to one side of where her son sat. The three shelves of vinyl recordings and above that the shelf running the length of the wall that held the old clock and a variety of found items from around the farm, as well as things her husband had collected here and there as he traveled and other things that were gifts. A shelf of curiosities, each with its own personal whisper of history and each also with a power and luminosity Thomas Pearce had either recognized and drawn forth or imposed upon them. Her eyes ran along that shelf and then up toward the bare wall with a single painting, not her husband’s work but some ancient Pearce patriarch who had always held that place on the wall. Finally she flicked her eyes across Hewitt and back briefly down to the photograph and then up to Jessica. Who sat with her hands loose in her lap and her face turned, waiting.
Mary Margaret straightened her back so she was upright, gathered on the couch. She said, “Everything was destroyed in that fire. I never until this moment saw an image of her. But the resemblance is clear. Who are you?”
This said with all the bravery the world can bestow upon an old woman, which is a great deal. Nevertheless Hewitt heard the tremble in his mother and wanted to protect her. From the bristling tragedy that had found and bound his parents? It was too late for that, too late by at least a decade before he was even born. And so sat silent, leaned forward in an old ladderback rocker.
Jessica lifted both hands and worked fingertips in circles in the muscles below her cheekbones, above her jaw. Then dropped her hands into her lap and said, “My mother was Celeste Willoughby
Pearce’s younger sister, Candace. Candace Willoughby Kress. I always knew about my aunt. My grandmother told me stories. When I was a little girl they found me more than once up at the cemetery before those stones, the ones for her and that little girl—”
“The hell.” Mary Margaret stood. “What do you want? Why are you here? There’s no money you know. He’s been dead twenty-three years and there’s nothing left but this crumbling farm and a little cash to help the Social Security see me through until I croak, and if there’s a dribble left it goes—”
Hewitt was at an even tempo with the rocker, one leg crossed over the other knee and without pause he said, “Mother.”
She stopped. Arrested. She looked about the room, not at the two people sharing it with her but at the room itself, the pine sideboard, the empty stuffed chairs, the cobwebs in the upper corners, the threadbare hooked rug, the great cold fireplace. Searching for something, near bewildered as if what she sought might be some younger self. Or another soul altogether. Someone to advise how best to proceed.
“I knew almost nothing of your aunt, their little girl. Has Hewitt told you how we met? Thomas Pearce and myself?”
The room was quiet except for the slow crunch of Hewitt’s rocker moving back and forth from the edge of the rug on to the floorboards.
Softly Jessica said, “Yes.” Mary Margaret looked now deeply at the girl, tilting her head to take her in. As if she were finally equipped for true appraisal.
Mary Margaret said, “By the time he came to me he’d buried all that as far inside as he could. It was a worry, a great fret to me for a time, wondering how he divided himself between past and present. Don’t get me wrong. Plenty of times I would catch him with his eyes clouded to another world, another place altogether. I was brave enough to never doubt he’d return from those times to what was right before him. And he always did. Even on his truly bad days I knew it was all part of how he had to work, the stations of his mind.”
She stopped and then looked at Hewitt. Who had stopped rocking but settled with his knee still crossed over the other. Serious and tender, he said, “Go on, Mother.”
She concentrated on him, then looked sternly at Jessica. “I think,” she said, “I’ve said enough for the moment. You must understand although I know enough to know most things are never truly finished, I did believe my husband’s past was one of those small pockets that get lost forever. And I give nothing away, do I now, by saying I was frightened of unknown revelations those first years but slowly came to believe it truly was all gone, all but the torment of memory in his head. Only to learn this morning nothing’s ever trusted to be done with. The past rears its head when we least expect it. Maybe when we least want it. Although there, you see, I can lie as easy as the next; there is no good time for the past to break down doors. And look at this. Sweet Mother of Mercy, you’re just a girl yourself. Yet here you are. So you located Hewitt. It’s easy enough to do these days. But why come? What did you think to find? What are you after, truly now?”
Jessica looked down at her hands. With her head tilted her hair fell raggedly forward, enough to obscure her face from the woman seated next to her, but not from Hewitt who watched intently and saw the familiar shades slide over her face and thought he knew what was coming but made no effort to intervene, guessing it would make it worse, at best not wanting to push things further with any wrong thing he might say.
Jessica stood, her hands still joined, now wringing each other before her. She looked at Hewitt’s mother and said, “Mrs. Pearce.” And then shot her eyes to Hewitt as if drowning. “I’m so sorry. But I can’t do this right now. I have to go. Oh shit, Hewitt, I’m sorry but I have to go right now I—”
He was up out of the chair and took her elbow and walked from the room, casting one glance back at his mother and went with Jessica into the kitchen and out on to the porch. Once there she paused and looked at him, her eyes splintered wide upon him.
He said, “You’re okay. You’re okay, honey. You just do what you need. You want to walk up into the woods or what?”
“No. I’m going to drive. I’ll just drive around. I don’t know. Maybe I’ll call later. Or just disappear for a while. A couple days. How long are they going to be here? I don’t think I can handle this. I’ve got to get out of here and I don’t know if I can come back because I know you have to walk in there and tell your mother what a fuck-up mess I am. So I don’t—”
He put his fingers gently on her mouth, stroking down over her lips. He said, “Jessica?”
She looked but did not speak.
“Jessica.”
“What?”
Hewitt silently took a deep breath. “Take a drive. A nice slow easy drive around. But make me a promise.”
“Why?”
Hewitt pressed his teeth together over his inner lower lip and then said, “Because we are sworn to each other. Don’t you remember that?”
She looked straight into his eyes and he was frightened by what he saw reflected there, not sure if it was himself he was seeing or her revealing the nadir of her despair. Finally she said, “Yes.”
He said, “You better. It’s only the second time in my life I’ve done that. Which means when I do I’m serious about it.”
A silence. Then she said, “What’s the promise you want?”
He wanted time but didn’t have it so his mouth shot from his hip, shot from his heart. He said, “I want you back here this afternoon.”
She reared. “I can’t begin to promise that.”
He said, “I want you back this afternoon. These people, strange or frightening as they might seem right now, are just people. So come back. I want you here. Because, after they’re gone home, I want you to know them the best you can. Because it’s like that old lady in there
said, there’s what you know and then there’s all the layers beneath. So promise me you’ll come back. Please.”
Her face was still struck hard, those muscles not yet let go. But she was nodding, that small steady metronomic dipping of her head. Then she stepped forward and kissed his cheek. “If I can I’ll be back. But, Hewitt?”
“Jessica.”
“I have to take care of myself first.”
Hewitt said, “Go on, get out of here. Go for a drive. Go visit Walter. And if you get lost try to do it someplace you can find a pay phone and call to describe where you are.”
“You asshole. I will never. Not ever. Be rescued.” And she turned and jogged down the steps in the morning sunlight and ran across the lawn toward the yard and her waiting VW.
H
E FOUND HIS
mother up in the garden on the granite slab near the sundial. A little hunched even in the warmth of the morning, the sun full upon her—not cold but worn down.
She’d sensed him and was waiting. He climbed up and sat beside her.
“You’ve kept the garden up.”
“It’s been a dry summer.”
“You should divide the peonies this fall.”
“I thought I did it last year. But maybe it was the year before. They’re devils. So old they’re almost royal the way they rear on up year after year.”
“Ah, no. They’re just good plain Catholic plants, multiplying the way God intended.”
He considered this and said, “Do you regret not having more children, Mother?”
She bit the word off. “No.”
After a time she said, “Are you going to tell me about her? This Jessica?”
Hewitt had come prepared to do this and so told almost everything. He chose not to relate the whole story of his father’s trip to Mississippi for the funerals of Celeste and Susan, seeing nothing but hurt in telling of that final scorch upon his father’s heart. But everything he did say was true. When he was done they sat some time more in silence. Mary Margaret had bent at one point during the telling and plucked up a small globe of white clover blossom and she held it close to her face, close enough so Hewitt could also see the hidden color beneath the white of the bloom, the faint pale pinks that were deep at the base of the small ball, before all joined together as a knot in the center.
“Poor child,” Mary Margaret said. That out of the way she said, “You can’t save her, you know.”
This irritated him. He said, “What it is, is we get along. For a time I thought I was helping her. Until I realized she was helping me.”
“So? What then? Are you going to marry her?”
“Goddamn it Mother. It really pisses me off when you don’t listen to me.”
“Oh. Listen to you, is that what you want? Believe whatever you say? It’s not allowed that I have my own thoughts?”
“My marrying Jessica is not a thought. It’s provocation. In a strange sort of way she and I are family, you have to remember that. It might seem a long reach to you but it’s not to either of us. Mostly we’re friends. It’s good Mother. Good for both of us. I’ve told her this is her home for as long or whenever she needs or wants it. Whatever else may or may not happen in my life, she’ll always be part of it. That’s the only thing I know for sure. She’s not taken the place of anybody else. She’s just a place in me all of her own. One I never knew was missing until she showed up. For Christ sake, Mother, can’t you understand that?”
He was sweating hard enough he could smell himself.
Mary Margaret sat beside him, not looking at him. Her eyes off over the garden, down over the road, the hills beyond. She was no longer slumped but upright and her eyes were bright as she looked
out over this land of her life. Hewitt had no idea what she was thinking, what to expect.
She made him wait.
When she leaned toward him she said, “You’re a good man, Hewitt. I believe your father would be proud.”
Then she stood and walked down out of the garden and left him there.
B
ETH AND
M
EREDITH
returned late afternoon.
Meredith fled her lips across his cheek and to his query about the morning she said only, “I liked it.” Then excused herself and went upstairs to nap. He was in the kitchen with his sister and their mother; Beth drinking lemonade from a can and Mary Margaret fussing and arguing with the old range, working with the propane side although he knew she preferred the wood. But it was far too hot a day for wood and so she wrestled to produce the old-style pot roast and a pan of sweet and sour cabbage and small roasted potatoes.