f a i l b e t t e r . c o m

Jeffrey Lent was born in Vermont and grew up there and in western New York State, on dairy farms powered mainly by draft horses. He studied Literature and Psychology at Franconia College in New Hampshire and the College at Purchase. He lived for many years in North Carolina, an enriching and formative experience. Lent currently resides with his wife and two daughters in central Vermont. His novel In the Fall

was a national bestseller reprinted four times in its first month of publication, was a New York Times Book Review Notable Book for 2000, and earned Jeffrey placement in both Barnes & Noble's and Borders’s new writer programs; his follow-up, Lost Nation,

was a summer reading pick of The Washington Post and USA Today. Both novels were BookSense picks, Book of the Month main selections, have been widely translated and are currently under film option. A Peculiar Grace

is his third novel.

A Peculiar Grace
An excerpt

Jeffrey Lent

Mary Margaret Duffy was a recent immigrant who worked by day in the kitchen of a hotel and lived just off Second Avenue south of Murray Hill in a two-bedroom coldwater flat she shared with four other girls. She had a nursing degree from Dublin but in 1948 there were ample well-trained American nurses to fill the hospitals and private clinics, a frustration she never forgot, that colored and embittered her life in ways hidden or explosively misdirected although at the time she believed she was happy enough, rising early to take the subway to midtown where she entered into a labyrinth of steam and heat and spent the first half of her shift preparing huge pans of soft scrambled eggs and the second assembling a stream of endless club sandwiches in every variation anyone might dream up. Mary Margaret was a quick study and so with the exception of her Tuesdays off she ate at work and held tight to her cash and allowed herself the pleasures of the great city rapturous with postwar elation although she did most of this as pedestrian and observer. Not for her the museums and grand concert halls or the wonders of Fifth Avenue where afternoons ladies with hats and white gloves were shopping, but as the nimble slip she was, quick on her feet and fleet with her eyes, her strawberry blond hair curled to her shoulders in the style of the day and her three good off-the-rack dresses, her skirt and sweater set, she spent her afternoons along the avenues and cross streets and found refuge in the reading room of the public library or further uptown in the smaller more comfortable rooms of the American Irish Historical Society. Evenings she would stay in and read magazines or listen to the radio or often as not slip out with one or more of her roommates down to the music hall which was nothing more than a bar with pool tables in the back and a jukebox with Sinatra and Goodman and the Dorsey Brothers but also Bing Crosby and Ruthie Morrissey and Christopher Droney, the mighty John McCormack and others all set to get the lads singing together and dancing with the girls on the ten square parquet feet of dance floor, and very quickly abandoning her glass of ale for a gimlet, ordered after overhearing the name and then sticking with the drink for the lightness it brought her head and body.

She’d noticed him from one of her first evenings but hadn’t given him much thought, the tall fair-haired older man sitting hunched and quiet over his whisky always at the far end of the bar in the small corner with only room for a stool or two, a man large enough and silent enough so more often than not regardless of how full the bar was, the corner was his own. What she did notice was what he was not—no devilry or merriment to his eyes, no effort to speak or even watch the girls as the other men did, no apparent motion at all beyond lifting his glass always half-full and furthermore he was of an age she couldn’t quite place but seemed lacking all vitality. But she kept noticing him, noting his rough sweater or denim working man’s shirt, his heavy overcoat that once had been quite fine and his raincoat of the same sort. Most notably, she never saw evidence at all of a hat, surely a mark of eccentricity that seemed to her carelessness as much as negligence.

Until finally Nancy the roommate she was most fond of one evening elbowed her ribs and near shouted into her ear, “If you won’t at least ask Frank as regards that one’s caught your eye I’ll do it myself. But it’s each to her own from there.”

Motioned close Frank leaned and told her, “I can’t tell you much, love. But he’s a timepiece of sorts for me. Two years now it’s the rare day he’s not in right at the spot of four and sits until half past ten and then is gone. All I can say is his money’s always on the bar and he drinks enough for most of the younger men but never so much as wobbles on his way out. He’s the sad man, that’s what he is.” Frank glanced down at the man and back to Mary Margaret. “There’s plenty men from the war with the long stare but that one, that one’s eyes are empty. Whatever’s brought him to that place is not, I’d swear, a thing I’d want knowledge of.”

So Mary Margaret Duffy slowly finished her drink and glanced at her little Woolworth’s wristwatch and ordered another and at ten minutes after ten stood off her stool. Nancy was twisted about, talking to two men at once and never saw Mary Margaret lift her purse and drink and walk down to the corner where there was no vacant stool but a space beside the sad man. If he saw her approach he made no sign. She placed her drink on the bar, leaned her hip against the wood and lifted her foot to the rail and gone suddenly all skittish and boggy brogue said, “I’m thinking if there was ever a man looked to need a kind human ear I’d wager you’re the one. If I was the betting sort of girl but I’m no gambler or grabber or whore. An there’s more to me than ear. I can set an brood as well as the next. I’ve seen it done champion. My da was first place and me mam not a full step behind. Listen to me run. Tell me to be off and I be a vapor to ya.”

His elbows heavy on the roll of the bar, his head down with his hair dull and she thought, The man needs a haircut. Then without looking at her his voice came, a near steady rumble. “Leave me alone. Please.”

His voice so unexpected and her own speech leaving her tilted she was sipping her drink when his words came and so she set her glass down and laid a hand on his arm and said, “I will. But ya have to look at me an tell me to my face,” only adding the last because as she was swearing to leave him she also felt the convulsive tremor jump his muscles when she touched him. She took her hand away and gathered her purse and looked long at her drink and decided she’d proven she’d had enough of that and turned and made her way shifting and dodging and short of breath out toward the avenue, out toward the air. Out to where she did not know but away from her fool self. A cool September evening with her purse hugged tight and the pooling yellow light of New York night shot through with other lights bright and dim as she walked, the lights of passing automobiles and taxis, storefronts both closed and open, the gray of the sidewalk almost soft to look at but hard under her short heels and for a striding moment she wondered how long it had been since she’d walked on bare earth and then her lip curled as she walked toward her empty night when she heard the voice behind her, the voice which had been there for at least a block but penetrated finally as meant for her, directed toward her. Coming not only after her but already surrounding her.

She stopped under a streetlight and stood, huddled tight to herself. She wouldn’t look up when he came upon her.

The sidewalk had bits of quartz the size of an eyelash embedded in it. She faced about to him, her arms folded tight over her chest and said, “I’m sure I heard ya wrong. Speak clear or I’ll scream Police.”

He stepped back, his hands extended slightly, open, harmless but halting, fumbling. His eyes in a panic. She almost believed he was a madman when he said, “I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinking. I’m out of practice with formalities I suppose you could say.”

“I could say most anything.” She ventured a cautious frown. “But it’s not a great line to try on a girl. Telling her you want to drown her.”

She watched roiling emotion scudding fast over his face. Fear and something close to revulsion and he worked his lips, wet them with his tongue and said, “Draw. You misunderstood. I’m an artist. I’d like to draw you.” The words now thickly encumbered as if his tongue was loathe to let them out.

He blinked and then a smile came and went. “No, no. I’d like to draw your face. Just trying to catch your face with a pencil. That would be enough.”

She studied him, her frown deepening. She said, “You’re frightening me. I think you should leave me alone.” The bog gone all out of her now, stiff and clear.

He made another attempt to smile, this less successful and she knew it was because he was trying. “I will if you want. But would you give me another chance? I could introduce myself and we could walk back to Frank’s where your friends are and we could talk there. I’d make an attempt at explaining myself.”

Mary Margaret looked hard upon the man before her. He wasn’t as old as she’d thought, perhaps in his early or middle thirties. His face was creased with weather and cares and his eyes freighted as he blinked under her scrutiny. She said, “If you’re a true artist you’d be a madman to want to draw the likes of me. And I’ve had enough of the bar tonight. If you had it in mind to walk and talk I’d be willing to do the same. If nothing else, you’re a story needs out.”

The long hours of night following the afternoon when Hewitt’s father died and he sat with his mother in the basement room next to the wine cellar, the locked room with its old rolltop desk and the wall of wide shallow steel map files, his sister Beth waiting in the Charlotte airport for a flight to New York and the train up from there, Mary Margaret told him all she learned that long-gone night but also of how little; how the stories that came out did so over the next year; of how Thomas Pearce would come into her life for days at a time, then weeks gone, and how she knew even from that first night that it would be this way until one way or another it would not. And she was prepared to await that answer.

She sat for him and he tried to draw. His studio was a cheap gutted apartment far down on the East Side, work tables of planks on sawhorses with cans and thick tubes of unopened paint, stacks of blank stretched canvases leaned against the wall, a pair of spotless easels. An old worn velvet daybed with a heavy mahogany scroll at one end, a mattress on the floor behind a curtain strung on a wire, a small gas cookstove and a sink. None of it quite new but nothing like she’d expected; the only color, the only pigment, the only paint was not the speckles and smears she’d expected the first time she went there but a broad oval on the plaster wall that even her untrained eye could see was nothing more than deep blue paint squeezed straight from the tube into a palm and then the hand working in furious swirls streaks and daubs upon the wall. She contemplated it as she sat for him and slowly the obvious rage began to make sense to her; a man had been forsaken by old and trusted tools. Or as he sat perched on a tall stool with a pad on his knees and a handful of sharpened pencils in his shirt pocket and after fifteen minutes or three or an hour and a half would rip the sheet from the pad and hurl it crumpled onto the floor all this wordless unless she moved when he spoke his frequent command “As before, as before.”

He saw her as what might save him long before she understood this. By the time of that comprehension on her part she knew it was true. And believed she would.

In the end it didn’t happen in New York although those years were as necessary as the two visits over two years when they took the train to Vermont to spend unholy weeks of manic infused vacation with his mother where Mary Margaret understood it was the place as much as the woman he wanted her to learn but also knew his mother saw her very differently than Thomas Pearce did and both women knew nothing was to be done about that although Lydia Pearce did outright ask if Mary Margaret was sleeping with her son and why bother with the charade and extra work of separate bedrooms. This over tea and cookies with thimbles of sherry on a summer afternoon when Thomas was wandering the woods above the majestic house.

The summer after that they went to Nova Scotia and the vast pile of the rest of their lives together that she’d seen from the start and held to finally tumbled and came to rest about their feet. Around them as sure as the frothing tide-rise.

But before this, long before this, she learned what had to be learned and then a lid clamped forever, nothing more. There came the dawn they’d been up all night when suddenly the wave of high energy she’d almost gotten used to came over him and he ordered that they dress and go out into the fog-drift of morning and hiked up to the bridge to Brooklyn and walked across it as the sun began to burn through and he led her up toward Clinton Hill and then down a small side street where they stood looking at a three-story brick building and as they had walked there he told her not only where they were going and what to expect but also where they were going in the past. To that evening distant and immediate as this spring morning. Which did not stop her from sitting on the curb across the street when his account trailed to nothing and he stood gazing upon what was not there, would never be there again, and she left him and sat facedown into the fabric of her gay spring dress and wept.

As if describing events happened to another, he told her. How he’d rented the third floor apartment while still a student at the nearby Pratt Institute and how it was not long after that he met his wife not in Brooklyn but Manhattan, a student of ballet, of galvanic personality and ambition but when the two met both knew their destinies with each other and he knew he was the perfect foil for her acerbic stringent wit and laced fury, believed she was as necessary as oxygen, and it was in these early days when he began to be noticed, to be taken a bit apart from his own crowd—a place he admitted he’d always thought himself to be. And still she danced and he loved that she danced, was happy to see her off mornings to classes and wait expectantly and braced late afternoons when she returned from auditions and what he did not say but the young Irish woman knew was that this woman was lovely and lithe, athletic and demanding and very likely angry also as his recognition grew as hers did not for then there came the baby, the little girl. And it was here and only here that his account faltered before he gathered and went on. How his love for Celeste and hers for him was instantaneous and ferocious but the morning Susan was born and he held the newborn looking down at her he was then and there flooded with a love he’d never dreamed existed, never expected from himself or thought possible in any human being. And how that never changed, as Celeste resumed her now more daunting efforts at the barre, and he took much care of Susan so very quickly a toddler and then a little girl who was he said in a voice as if recounting the previous day’s weather the only thing, human or otherwise and especially human, who was never ever an interruption to his work, who he’d hold on one hip as he worked on the canvas before him, learning to rethink his actions and speed as a one-handed man. How she knew the names of the colors and could find the right tube by the time she was three. How she’d go with him down to the naval yard or the piers or further south to the leather tanning yards, the boatyards, the ironworks and manufacturing blocks, the warehouses of goods bound for the ships or across the river to Manhattan, or setting up on the rocky shoreline of the East River within view of the magnificent bridge as he sketched boats and barges and tugs and freighters of all manner and size. The little girl leaning against his side so she could watch the pencil work on the paper. How Celeste slowly and without apparent bitterness retreated from auditions but never the classes and how the phonograph was in constant play ranging from the great ballets, primarily the Russians, to swing records but also music Celeste found and brought home and introduced him to—the older Negro jazz and race records of music she called the blues and also hillbilly music or the wild peculiar mixture of western swing and also the food, the food gained and gathered from all edges of the city as if for Celeste learning food was learning languages. And Susan grew and on her fourth birthday they held a party for her that was all adults, all people she knew and how he stood watching these formally attired guests and the poised little hostess and knew those people were here not only because of him but honestly for her as well and how she would lead, was already leading an extraordinary life. Now fully away from Pratt and almost all other formal ties except for the midtown gallery that handled his work as well as the Philadelphia and Chicago collectors, the wooly-haired duke or earl or whatever he was—an Englishman—who sent monthly telegrams and appeared two or three times a year and at the moment was bent at the waist in his tails as he led Susan in a delicate and not altogether disastrous attempt at a waltz. The upswell of cheers in the darkened room as she blew the candles and opened the pile of brightly ribboned boxes and someone handed her a half-filled flute of champagne and she sipped it as if it were the only reasonable complement to the occasion.

How he worked. From noon until three in the morning and back up two hours later to work again until sunset. Then dinner and a short exhausted sleep on the sofa trickling in and out as Celeste read to Susan and bathed her and put her to bed and then came to him and slowly woke him and they would sit talking quiet, or loving, and then she’d go to bed as he brewed a pot of coffee and went back to work. How this would go on for days at a time, weeks even, and then he’d fall apart and sleep three or four days around the clock waking only to eat once or twice, then always beefsteak and nothing more with a tumbler of whisky and back to sleep. And how sometime during this wonderful catastrophic haze he lost sense of things, lost track of himself and of his two girls, as he thought of them.

That night two years ago. The second autumn after the war. A soft evening when he’d finished a marathon of three linked paintings, of days and days he couldn’t count and so kissed his daughter and spat a No at his wife with her offered dinner and walked out and down the block around the corner to a bar because his head was blistered and reeling and he needed not quiet so much as nothing demanded or wanted or hoped of him for a few hours and how he sat there into the dark hours and even heard the sirens and saw the window-speckle of racing fire engine lights and pushed his glass across the bar for another drink. And was sipping that down when a man, a neighbor he knew only by face, was pummeling his shoulders and shouting at him and Thomas Pearce knocked over his stool and ran out and up the street already seeing the fire rising above the buildings, already knowing what he was heading toward.

And stood at the inner edge of the great circle of watchers, the inner circle a snake nest of canvas hoses and huge puffing pumper trucks and the useless ladder extended toward an empty flame-licked blackness of night, held back by men sanctioned to be within that circle from which he was excluded, the firefighters and the nervous less well-protected police as the top half of the building spewed upward and as he knew he would Thomas Pearce heard the popping explosions of jars of turpentine and thinners within the abhorrent tornado of fire and standing there, held there, restrained, he saw clear as if he was within the leaping orange fluid structure, the pile of rags soaked with spirits and gum and turpentine that had accumulated to the side of his big easel, into the corner to rest and ferment and foment.

Last thing he said to Mary Margaret Duffy before she sank backward to the curb and cried as he stood silent before the rebuilt building, arms strapped across his chest was, “Once it sank in there was no hope I pulled away from those men. Of course they needed to talk to me, wanted to talk to me. But I got free and walked away. I walked for days. Days and nights. It was both of them, I want you to understand that. It was all of it. But what comes back over me again and again, what I do not understand and never will was Susan. She was not just another person. She was her very own self all ways but she was part of me. She came from part of me. Where did she go? Where did my Susan go?”

Hewitt could learn nothing more. There were no photographs, no letters, no papers left behind. His mother would not or could not recall his father’s first wife’s family name or where she came from. She did not know where they were buried. His father, if he ever visited those graves, did so alone on one of his occasional trips to New York. Or wherever they might be. So he had two names and the enormity of what his father silently lived with. All those winter evenings with a big fire popping in the old fireplace in the living room how often had his father stared deep into those flames and considered those other greater malignant flames? Twice a year birthdays came and went unnoted. And two anniversaries. The one in stark counterpoint to the other but both annual bookends of a sort.

And now, at three in the morning, older than his father not only when he lost his first family but gained the strength and courage to try again, Hewitt Pearce stood at his night window and looked out on the summer starlit land and was most amazed by the love that pierced the brooding man. He wondered at the struggles held silent in his love for his family. For the love between his parents had been a visible thing, a vivid living presence that enveloped them all. A strong man, Hewitt thought. Trying to determine the difference between the passion of one’s life and the love of one’s life. And could not. Yes, a strong man. Stronger than himself.

Two

Despite his restless night he was up early. He was always up early. Winter mornings he slept in, sometimes until six o’clock. When summer days were longest he might lie in bed past four listening to the birds rioting over the pleasure of a new day for as much as half an hour before rising. The house this morning was cooled down but the kitchen held a touch of warmth from the range. A thick fog from the branch of the river ran along the valley but by ten it would be gone and the day would be warm, dry and clear. A slight breeze perhaps. Well up into the sixties, perhaps low seventies.

He’d heard nothing from upstairs and wouldn’t be surprised if Jessica slept most of the day. He still wasn’t clear where she’d come from or how long she’d been on the road. He didn’t even know her last name.

He went into the fog already backlit with the faintest of yellow glows and down to the Volkswagen and made a slow trip around the car. The inspection sticker was current, with seven months left. The tires were in bad shape but he already knew that from observing the tracks on the woods road the morning before. At the rear he eased down to kneel. The plates were current as well. He popped open the back, feeling this was not invasive but mechanical and his intent helpful. The little engine seemed in good enough shape, reasonably clean with cables and even the dinky heater tube was solid. Finally he lifted the dipstick but even that was better than it could be—the oil was perhaps half a quart low and thick and black as a skillet. So it wanted an oil change. Everything else looked good to go. He rocked back on his heels and quietly shut the compartment door and pressed until he heard it latch. Somebody had watched over this car and Jessica was the obvious caretaker.

Hewitt’s own driving life ended a couple years after his breakup with Emily—those nigh mythic years of slow but determined destruction and absolute inability to see anything beyond his own flopping bruised heart. The final incident had been a winter afternoon when he’d been drinking since well before dawn the day before and without the least idea how he got there watched in bemused detachment as the old Volvo spun three accelerating circles on black ice up above Emmett Kirby’s, then at sharply defined greater speed went down the embankment to crash through the ice of Pearce Brook, shivering to a crunching grinding stop in the thick ice, boulders and frigid water, which while only two feet deep left Hewitt stranded with a broken femur, clavicle and cracked ribs. He sat placidly in the car and exchanged pleasantries with old Emmett who’d hitched down on his double canes to see what the Pearce boy was up to now, awaiting the official arrivals when the humor pretty much ended.

For most of a year after the accident he’d taken a sliding membership of painkillers but quit them all at once when he was astonished to realize he was a junkie. During the bad first month he’d thought his body couldn’t function without the pills but he set a deadline to go clean for six months even if the pain was so acute as to throw him off everything else. He could take the time. Three months along he still gimped and ached but owned his brain again. He’d been stoned as a loon during the final DUI hearing when he was still on crutches. Halfway through these proceedings he knew which way it was going to go and dug his license from his old wallet and so when the judge asked if he had anything to say on his own behalf, he’d tugged down by the coatsleeve the old family attorney who would reiterate all the arguments from the past which Hewitt knew held no water and hobbled up to the bench and said to the judge, “You’ve been more than fair with me in the past. I expect you want this.” And laid the license down before the judge and turned and went back to his seat.

Everything after that was a formality. Except the conversation with Walter right after that final accident, which had been shock enough to take seriously. Of course it’d been easy to quit the death-by-whisky drinking when he’d been flying on unlimited Percocet. Walter was no fool and suggested Hewitt allow himself a couple of beers or wine if the occasion fit. Walter had said, “We all have something eats our ass. And nobody can tell another person when the time’s come to stop dancing in the dragon’s jaws. But you’ve gone past tragic to pathetic, Hewitt. I’m probably the only person who can tell you that. And I’m kinda sick of you just now.”

He went along to the forge. He had no definite plan to work but didn’t discount the possibility either. He had to sit there a while to see if it was a day for iron or not. This was the essence of what his customers perceived as a great problem—the fact he refused to state a deadline however vague. The customer could bring the most precise drawings of what he wanted and the finished product would often not resemble the drawing at all. Until installation Hewitt would visit the job site only once—to make his own measurements regardless of the precision of those already handed to him. This was now his reputation and he grumpily knew it added rather than subtracted from the value of his work. On the door to the forge was a sign, hand painted in black block letters against a plain piece of plank. The legend ran:

if you want it done your way learn how to do it
& make it yourself.
your commission is not my vision.

Gordy Peeks had built the rough shell of bricks and the hearth and chimney but Hewitt had finished the rest himself. The brick reached to shoulder height and above that were wooden walls and an open-raftered tin roof. The only windows were on the north side so sunlight never altered the precise reading of heat through color and therefore malleability of the metal. The floor was hardpack. A pair of anvils fastened with giant forged staples deep into chunks of upright log stood in the center of the floor along with a wooden tub of water for annealing. On the brick front of the forge pegs studded into the mortar held several dozen pairs of tongs. Behind him close to the anvils a workbench kept all the small tools within easy reach—the hardies and fullers and swages, holdfasts, chisels, punches, bicks and forks, rivet headers and nail headers and bolt headers, various plates and taps, clippers and shears, also somewhere close to twenty hammers each different in weight and size and function, files and rasps, calipers in diverse sizes and metal rules of varying length. The tools with wooden handles were a special joy, the wood so old and used the handles were smooth, almost soft in the hand, sweat-polished like wood butter. Along the wall was a second workbench of heavy two-inch hemlock planks on hardwood foundation posts cut from abandoned beams. On this bench was the long post vise with its leg that reached clear to the floor, beside that a smaller bench vise for lesser work, a hand-cranked post drill he preferred because he didn’t burn up bits that way, a bench grinder with a foot-powered treadle; wads of steel wool in a wooden lard box stained through now with linseed oil, a dozen or so metal brushes of various shapes and widths, some with brass bristles for finish work and others with steel for rougher work. A good-sized vat filled with motor oil he could soak heavily rusted iron in. Above the bench on the wall hung a calendar from Sanborn & Sons Harness Shop, two months out of date. In the far corner covered with a piece of canvas was the set of tanks and oxyacetylene torches, his welding helmet resting on top like a discarded fencing mask. The beauty of the acetylene weld was undeniable. And many of the finer steels he was forced to work with required it. It was almost impossible to find high-grade wrought iron anymore—now mostly steel or steel alloys. But Hewitt was known to junkdealers from Machiasport to Troy, from lower Quebec to the Berkshires. Almost all who would call him when they came across true iron stock, so he had an ample supply resting on chocks in the barn. He saved this for special projects, although he could never predict when a project would became special, requiring that fine metallurgy. And the variety and consistency of the modern steels were not without their own merit. He knew much of what he did, seen through other eyes, was an unnecessary pain in his ass. But he did what he had to do to live with the work.

Resting against the double doors was his current project, a set of driveway gates for a summer home up in the Pomfret hills. When he took the job he told the owner not to construct the brick columns that were meant to hold the gates and meld them with the white board fencing. Because the gates would be too heavy to simply drill into mortar and he’d have to sink iron posts for anchors. Hewitt had leaned back against his own fencepost at this point and gone on to explain the gates he was building could not possibly be ready that fall. He advised the man to leave his driveway open for the winter—it would make it easier for the plow truck. Otherwise he could go to Agway and buy a cheap tube gate that should do the job.

The more they came prepared to deal with his difficult approach to the work, the more difficult he became. Some days he thought he should just quit. But there wasn’t enough money to do that. And there was the huge question of filling his time. He’d boxed himself into a corner by making a sincere effort to do the opposite. His work was good but he wasn’t so proud to not realize that it was the focus he brought to it more than some special gift. Nobody paid attention anymore, was what he thought. Mostly he stayed to himself. He belonged to no association or guild and disliked nothing more than being cornered by another smith eager to talk technique. Because too many people confuse technique with vision. You get to a certain point and then you can do it or should quit. Although, as with all rules there was the exception—his long strange luscious friendship with a smith from northern Vermont, Julie Korplanski.

He studied the gates resting against the north wall. Heavy rectangles outlined with great straps of four-inch stock were the frames of the gates. The rest interweaving hammered straps that left perfect ten-inch squares throughout the gate, the straps both horizontal and vertical not single but paired with one slightly wider than the other, the pairings reversed every other time, the way patterns reverse in a tartan. The ten-inch squares framed delicate inner circles of round stock. Inside these circles he planned something that so far eluded him. So the work waited as did the man in Pomfret, who probably wouldn’t arrive for the summer until Independence Day weekend. Hewitt would hear from him.

For a moment he contemplated the possibility that the gates were done. Except for the mounting hardware they could go up and be beautiful. Wire brush them down and work them with steel wool and then warm the forge for a week running and apply coats of linseed oil as often as possible. He studied them, even intentionally blurring his vision to see them as if in passing. They were beautiful, but not done—he knew when a project was complete. So he would leave them a bit longer. The other option was to fire the forge and do small-job work, not the sort of things he sold but latches and hinges and such that he’d give to friends. Or use himself. There was a barn latch of forged iron that had broken that past winter.

A Peculiar Grace © 2007 Jeffrey Lent
Reprinted with the permission of Atlantic Monthly Press, an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

A Peculiar Grace An excerpt

Jeffrey Lent

Two

A Peculiar Grace
An excerpt