V
Henry and Mary
Henry’s house was two rooms up and two rooms down and each of the downstairs rooms had its own door to the sagging front porch. There was a shed kitchen in back. In the corner formed by the main house and the kitchen was a small storage room where chopped wood was stacked and rats ran rampant among the sacks of beans, rice and feed corn. To the north the cow regularly pushed through a split rail fence in disrepair, meandered up the road over the culvert and to the barn where she made an insistent noise to be let back in through the fence to the barnyard. She could just as well have waded the wide but shallow part of the creek that ran through the culvert under the road and divided the small sparse pasture from the barnyard, but she never learned that simple convenience.
The barnyard itself was something of a shrine to the broken and bedraggled character of the owner. Scattered about were rusted-out wood cookstoves, bits and pieces of old horse-drawn farm equipment and a collection of beehives, half-used rolls of tar paper and odds and ends of lumber. The hay bales inside were not rotated, and fresh hay was stacked atop old and moldy bales. To the south of the house was the garden. To the west, a mountain stood steep and straight behind an unused stone root cellar that was home to a nest of copperheads and a wood toolshed filled with a variety of old lawn mowers, empty bottles and cans, some handsaws and scythes. A steep path up the hillside led to the outhouse, and Henry had attempted to ease the climb by laying a twisted lane of rock steps.
The mountain was in many ways a barrier, blocking the rising sun early in the day, cutting off the most direct route to the nearest town and separating Henry from the neighboring homestead. It could change in moments from a warm and sunlit friendly landscape buzzing with bees and birds to an ominous wall of coldness and dark, funneling strong winds and imposing its shadow on the little house. Henry ignored the mountain. Mary stared at it incessantly. Sometimes she saw Robert walking miraculously down its steep flank and then she would run indoors.
Every morning Henry went out at dawn while it was still gray and misty and milked the one cow he had kept after Elvira died. Mary went with him and this was the nicest part of their days together. She was peaceful and opened her mouth to let him squirt the milk straight from the cow’s teat into her mouth. She loved the warm milk. He had tried of course to teach her to milk, but she was never able to master the quick movements that first allowed the milk to drop into the teat and then stopped it from squeezing back up into the udder. As time went on Henry was content to see her pleasure in the milk.
Robert did the milking for Henry on Sundays because Henry would do no work on the Sabbath. He knew their usual routine. He had seen Henry hide his money in a pill container in the flour crock in the kitchen and he had even seen Henry sing hymns to Mary. He had seen many things about their lives they thought were private. On one of his visits to the lady anthropologist, he suggested she go out to see Henry and Mary and write about them.