VIII
Henry and Mary
The morning of the rape, the two Baker brothers waited for Henry and Mary to come back from the barn and one of them jumped Henry while the other held the girl. It didn’t matter; she wouldn’t have left Henry even though there was nothing she could do to help him. When the boy realized Mary wasn’t going to run but would just stand there screaming to the lonely mountain, he helped his brother bind Henry’s feet and his hands behind him with pieces of baling twine that hung behind the kitchen door and they gagged his mouth with a rag from the kitchen sink.
Some glimmer of humanity made them turn the bound man’s face to the wall so he could not see what was happening to his girl. She had never stopped screaming and it made them nervous. They each took a turn holding her down while the other raped her, and she never stopped screaming and it didn’t take long because she made them nervous. She had no idea what they were doing to her. She only knew they wouldn’t let her move and they hurt her with a surprising pain she’d never felt before and they made her bleed again. They left her on the floor and found the money in the flour crock, took that and ran. When they had reached the safety of their truck they broke into nervous laughter. Mary’s screaming hadn’t stopped.
Mary couldn’t untie the twine that held her father prisoner, and he struggled as he had during the rape to get free but he couldn’t loosen the sharp cutting twine. He struggled in silence while Mary screamed and tried to get into his lap.
It was Robert who finally appeared and saved them. He untied the twine and Henry told him about the two Baker boys who had done this to him and raped his girl and stolen his money. Robert didn’t say much but he did tell Henry where the Baker boys had a secret spot where they went to hunt deer with bows and arrows off season: a large rock that had caught the fall of an old maple so many paces north of the cave by the side of the spring that had once been a waterfall. He had often seen the Baker boys in that spot, quiet, not smoking or talking, nor even daring to pee in the vicinity because the odor would scare off the deer and they’d have to make do with greasy possum or bits of squirrel meat on all them tiny bones. That’s what Robert told Henry.
Henry took his shotgun and moved quietly and quickly upon them. First he shot toward their privates and then their faces. He figured that was right for what they had done to his girl. He had parked on a logging road not far from the spot and he dragged each body in turn to the truck. He had to hurry because the cow would be mooing soon as its burden of milk got heavy in the morning and Mary would wake up. He took the bodies to the overlook on top of Little Mountain where it was steep and there was a small stone retaining wall and a trash can for the picnicking tourists who stopped for a view of the valley. There was one of them half-car, half-truck things parked there but no one appeared to be in it…must be broke down…not so unusual. He rolled each body in turn over the top of the retaining wall and watched it roll down the steep rocky incline into the thick brush not too far below and heard it fall even farther through the brush. Then he had to start up his truck, which had died on him while he worked, and drove back home to milk the cow and comfort his Mary. She had only stopped screaming the night before when she fell asleep by the stove and she woke up this morning as Henry came into the kitchen wanting her milk, as if nothing had happened. Only her eyes were different.