Fiction Archives

Henry
Ann Minoff
from Volume7 Issue2  

          Henry refuses to stop cannot stop emptying velvet trays of pins necklaces and earrings pummeling each bead and tin plated glass ball to a fine dust. He lifts a long gold filled chain from the bottom tray and snaps the soldered links until they lie on the floor, a final offering to his dark Maria. That’s what he calls her, used to call her when they were together meeting nearly every night outside of town.

            They first met while Henry worked the counter at the corner restaurant. Just six feet tall, his thick hair cut close to the scalp, his short sleeves rolled up, Henry rang the cash register, wrote the orders and ran them to the short-order cook. At the end of the day he washed the tables and restocked the napkins, the salt and pepper shakers before locking the doors. On Sundays Maria usually stopped by for coffee around 5:00 PM. Henry watched her walk in and look around. Sometimes she wore a tight-fitting yellow dress that swiveled around her legs. Other days she wore a blouse and skirt, her dark hair framing the brown eyes and small mouth. Henry asked if she was new in town.

            She said, “Not new, not old either.”

            Henry smiled. “Do you always speak in riddles?”

            “Only when I’m feeling a little shy.”

            They talked while the dinner families came and went. They talked about the town, about the railroad. For years Maria’s father ran the switching station for the three railroad companies. Henry told Maria he and his friends loved to play behind the train depot. They would pony ride the last car, jumping on as the train started up. If her father was there he yelled at him and the other boys as the train pulled away. Maria stayed at the counter spinning around in the stool as they talked.

            The barn just outside of town was perfect. Once used by his family but now abandoned, a vacant caved-in box, brown-stained red paint hanging from the three walls left standing. His family, once dairy farmers moved to town just after he was born. They sold off the corn and the tractors, the cows and chickens, but not all the land. They kept 24 acres including the farmhouse,  barn, corn silo and four tool sheds.

            In the heat of summer they would meet. Henry rode his father’s pick-up truck from the white stucco house on Delaney Avenue to the old farm thinking about her, about her crazy laugh and the way she looked up and to the side if he asked her something she didn’t want to tell him about. The heavy tires knocked, rolling over the pebbles and small rocks on a wide dirt path winding from the road to the stone farmhouse. The cow barn was off to the side on the left of the path. Before he stopped the engine he could smell her feel Maria breathing as if she were inside him breathing him herself.

            She lay on the damp straw smiling at him, her head tilted to one side, her shoulders pushed forward opening her neck and what lay below for view. Maria ran her fingers through her hair and laughed unbuttoning his shirt as he tried to kiss her face. “Hello, Henry. That’s right.”

            He stopped. Maria asked, “What’s the matter?”

            “I was afraid you wouldn’t be here.”

            “You’re afraid?”

            “Only that you won’t be here. I’m afraid of that.”

            “I’m here, Henry. Don’t be afraid of nothing.”

            Henry kissed her again and again. She waited until he handed her a small package which she opened, curling her toes into his belly pulling his shirt away from his body with her feet. This time he had found her a necklace of rose quartz and green venturine. Genuine semi-precious stones. He chased through the county flea market running from table to table, scouring the dealers’ showcases looking for her gift. He found what he wanted at the last table. She smiled and put the necklace on.

            At the end of the night after they held arms and legs, mouths searching brown-tipped nipples and the deepest forest of green trees and blue ponds Henry ever tasted. At the end while they were still breathing each other’s air Henry kissed her fingers one by one. He liked the salt, the feeling of the wet roundness of her hardness and the different smells gathered in the soft of her palm. She waited till he was done, kissed him behind the neck and left.

            Henry watched her walk away and as the barn door closed he felt that the walls would fall in bury him in the wet hay underneath the cow manure and summer heat.

            Night after night he came home after closing the restaurant, showered, shaved, changed his clothes and ran out the door.

            His mother asked, “Where you going?”

            His father answered, “Well, he ain’t going to church, Mother.”

            They sat in the living room, his father reading the paper, his mother flipping through one of her magazines listening to the truck’s engine roll over and drive away.

            When Maria stopped coming to meet him he refused to believe it. He wouldn’t believe it. He rode down the county highway outside of town thinking about her, worrying about her. Maybe she’ll be there tonight. And when she wasn’t there, he thought, maybe she was sick. Oh God, don’t let her be sick. He saw her lying on her bed, her black hair against the pillow.

            The empty road paralleled the Western Pacific railroad. More than once he rode alongside the Pacific Baltimore shuttle, shiny black Pullman cars at the end, the train’s whistle following him back to the silent barn. Only the old cow smells and laced-up spider webs, the damp hay and the rusted cow pails watched Henry kick the barn door, shaking it off its last hinge, throwing it against one of the caved-in walls.

            One night he drove back to her home to talk to her. He needed to see her and find out what happened. Henry parked the truck and as he got out he saw her in her bedroom. She put on the red dress with the stupid curls on the bottom. A man knocked on the door. Maria let him in, pulling him in. Henry knew he should run from there but he couldn’t. Through the unshaded windows in the shadows of the house he watched them make love on the kitchen table against the stairs in the dark on the front porch. At the end after the man left she added the new piece of jewelry to one of her trays. A different tray for pins. A different tray for necklaces. A tray for silver earrings and a tray for gold-filled earrings. She laid the trays on her bed, trying on one necklace after another holding a silver mirror in her hand.

            Henry empties the last tray, shaking its contents over the glittering mound below, and waits for her to come home. He tucks in his shirt and runs his hands over his wiry hair. God knows how long it’ll be. The rocker he sits in faces the living room window, giving him a full view of the street and the front of the house. The view, a row of poorly made two-bedroom shacks on the other side of the street, one half-dimmed street lamp and black cat sitting beneath the lamp. A porch in the front and two small apple trees in the yard. Around the perimeter of the house, planted long before Maria lived there, is a berry-laden mistletoe hedge that wild birds perch and feed on. Henry knows those shacks are just waiting for a match. The wood slats of the rocker hit the hard floor. Smack, smack, smack. An image of a young man being whipped appears in his mind. Henry looks ahead and hums an old country tune, fingering a worn rabbit foot in his pocket. He wants her to come home afraid for her to come home.

            In the dark Henry hears a drip somewhere in the house. He finds a wrench underneath the kitchen sink and readjusts the washer, scraping off green pieces of rot. Fixing the leak, just fine. Those pipes aren’t going to last. Not for long they aren’t. Too old. He uses a toothpick to get the green from under his nails. She hates dirty fingernails. Always making me wash my hands under the water pump. In back of the barn Henry pumped and pumped until a small film of well water fell loose, the water bitter cold. She sure likes clean hands only. Even her house is set in place. Everything is where it’s supposed to be. Henry hunts for  more leaks and discovers a cabinet door off the hinge. Fixes that. Finally he sits back in the rocker. Gets up from the rocker prowling the dark of the house, hunting nothing, just hunting.

When he was a boy his father smacked him a lot. Smacked him for being late for supper, for lying, for kicking the cat, for running in the house, for not saying yes, sir and no, sir. His mother watched behind the door, her round face peeking around the door. “Don’t hurt him, Father.”

            His dad always answered, “He won’t break, Mother.”

            Henry feels Maria kissing his face, the back of his neck. He folds his head in his hands and cries, Oh God. He pulls the rabbit foot from his pocket and rubs it hard between his hand, then on his face along the bottom of his chin. The fur, shorn down from handling, softens his jaw and Henry relaxes. Please, Maria, please. After a time he stands in front of the window watching dust particles drop to the ground. The emptied street groans under the weight of the heat, dying, slowly dying. He falls into the chair and waits some more. It’s not until the sound of small birds greeting the gray of another day that he hears a car drive up to the house.

            The darkened light of the street lamp reveals shadows within shadows. The car parks on the curb and Henry strains to see. Inside the car Maria kisses the man in the front seat. The man grabs her and kisses her back. After a time he reaches around her and opens the car door. Maria slides across the front seat and gets out.

            Henry sits in the house in the rocker by the window watching Maria look up at him from the street below. Her mouth opens, clicking her teeth from side to side.  Maria kicks open the front door and drops her purse on the floor. The kitchen to her left is so neat it looks unused. Her high heels mark the wood floor as she looks across the room at Henry. Evening’s dim light shrouds his face

            She narrows her eyes. She lifts her finger shouting at him, “Henry, what’s the matter with you?”

            Henry pleads, “Maria, listen to me, please.”

            “I’m not listening to you, boy. You lied. You lied. Now I could be in big trouble.”

            Henry raises himself from the rocker. Dropping to his knees, he crawls to her. “I’m sorry I lied to you. I won’t never again. I promise. I won’t tell. Never.”

            He holds Maria around her legs, smelling her dress, her skin. “Please, Maria. Just once. I miss you. Goddamn, I miss you so.”

            “You miss my ass, that's what you miss. Get away, Henry. Your momma will pop me into the county jail for sure. I’m not going to no place like that. I should have known. You are a fool, boy, and you’re just too damn big for your own good. For my own good, that’s for sure.”

            She drags her hand across his face, “Come back in a year. I’ll be here.”

            “No. I can’t wait. We can go to Carolina to Arkansas. They let you marry at fourteen. I’m almost seventeen Maria. We’ll be safe there.”

            “Oh shit, Henry. I can’t do that.”

            “Maria, please. We can leave tonight. I got money, Maria. I got plenty of money.”

            “You got nothing.”

            “Maria.”

            Maria pulls Henry’s hair, pulling him to her face. She kisses him. “No, Henry.”

            Henry’s body jerks back and forth whining, “Please, Maria, come away with me.”

            Pushing him toward the door. “You got to go now, Henry. I’m not going to no North Carolina or Arkansas with you. I can’t.”

            Henry feels the walls collapsing. He can’t breathe. He steps away from her. Her yellow dress, wet from his face, weaves across her chest, outlining her breasts waving in the air. Henry watches her walk away. She stands in front of the bedroom door, her arms crossed in front of her. Maria keeps her weight on one leg, raising the left hip in the air. The yellow rayon, wet from the heat, curves in the small of her back.

            Henry shouts, “You’re a whore, Maria!”

            She turns, facing him, and laughs.

            He screams, “You’re a fucking whore!”

            She laughs again. Her laughter zigzags across the county, over tree stumps and empty corn fields, over rooftops and half-collapsed cow barns. Henry runs out the door over the wet grass. He drives down the dark-lit street, allowing the dog heat of Indian summer to lift him off the road, back to a white house on Delaney Avenue.

            The next day and the next Henry lies in bed, not wanting to get up. He feels the heat inside his chest that just won’t stop, though he doesn’t want water or need water. His mother knocks on the door leaving him a plate of food.

            He hears her yell downstairs, “Wally, our boy is sick.  He’s just lying in that bed looking at nothing. Can’t you go do what a father is supposed to do?”

             His father knocks on the bedroom door, walking into a dark-blue room with one window on the left. The window is closed. Compressed damp air, so heavy that each breath thickens the body, drawing  dust and heat inside the lungs. Henry lies on the bed, his back to his father, his face pulled together, his eyes dropped below the bed. A yellow paste rims his upper lip. The drawn shades somehow add to the heat, magnifying the dark rays of the sun inside the room. Wally opens the window and sits on the edge of the bed.

            “Well, Henry, you have to decide.”

            Henry hears him through a wall, his hands swung over the side of the bed, his eyes fixed on a crack between the natural wood floor panels.

            “You have to decide whether you want to live with her or without her.”

            Wally pauses, pressing his thoughts into a sentence. “One week is enough thinking. let her go now, boy. Just let go.”

            Henry hears the door shut. His arm, stretched over his head, butts up against his face. A fly buzzes from one end of the room to the other. Henry smells fresh air moving from under the window shade to his face. He can hear his father and mother downstairs in the kitchen.  He coughs and the back of his tongue pulls away from the top of his mouth. He can feel strings of thick liquid hanging from inside his cheeks. How long? Oh yeah, a week. A week. Henry rolls to the end of the bed and falls to the floor. His legs shake apart and he pushes himself into a semi-standing position. He showers, throwing himself under the cool water, letting the water fall against his eyes and open mouth, washing away the heat, the flies, and the black-and-white dreams of running across a field of hay looking for something.

            Dressed, Henry sits down at the kitchen table while his mother cooks country slices of bacon, eggs and pancakes and dark coffee. He stares at the refrigerator while she talks to him. The fridge is covered with odd-shaped magnets. His father calls them her Southern Baptist Hallelujah magnets.

            Henry gets up from the table. “I’ll be going now.”

            Martha questions him,  “The diner folks been calling every day wanting to know when you’re going back. Where you going Henry?”

            “Not sure.”

            “Well, your father told me to leave you be, though it’s hard, seeing as you don’t know what you want.”

            Henry looks at his mother, her brown hair cut short, combed behind her ears, the calico apron strings hanging from the sides. Sometimes Martha forgets to tie her apron and the flaps shake from side to side as she cooks, swinging near the top of the stove.

            Henry starts the truck, not sure where he’s going, just going. He turns left, heading south where she lives, though he doesn’t think about that. He’s too gnawed and stripped inside, as if parts of himself are hanging together for no good reason, ready to disappear. He doesn’t understand, he doesn’t want to understand. He wants to ride. The bounce of the wheels on the road and the heat of the engine calm his stomach. He can see the sun push its way through the heavy mist ahead, making everything white, all the trees and hills, all the hardness and easy times dissolving at the end of the road as if they never were there, never happened.

            The south side of town backs into the Mechanic River close enough to the churlish water to taste the yellow foam the wind carries over from the Louisiana sea. Henry drives through the part of town where no one’s looking over their porch or sitting on the porch watching him.

They’re somewhere else, dying somewhere softly. He rolls the window open, leaving the top of his arm bare to the sun, marking the skin. Riding down the street without looking at anything, he heads south until he’s on the county highway that connects the town to the rest of the world. Wide stretches of dry cornfield on either side of the road, the tops of the green withered and limp, his blue eyes glaze over, caught in the swirl of the road under the heat melting in front of the wheels, his truck sinking down into the black macadam. Not sure how long it’s been, Henry hears the truck rumble and then even out, pouring down over the road. He drives until the truck turns itself to the left and runs over the familiar pebbled driveway past the stone farmhouse. Henry parks the truck in front of the caved-in barn forcing two black-headed crows from the roof.  Leaning against the wheel, aware of the wide expanse of meadow just beyond the tool shed, breathing the smell of cow and damp hay, he looks at the barn door and gets out. His legs still heavy from his week in bed, collapse for a moment, making him fall against the side of the pick-up. The crows return to the roof, screaming on top of the beams piercing a hole through the afternoon sun.

             In the open back of the truck Henry lifts off a brown tarpaulin, stiff and bent, from a red metal toolbox. He drags the toolbox off the truck and lays it down near the barn door. He finds three pair of old hinges and nails them into the door frame and the side of the barn, resetting the door, reshaping the bottom and side. Opening and closing the ten-foot door, resetting it again until it hangs right.

             Henry opens the door and almost swoons from the deep flowered pockets of old barn smells, holding to the side of the wood beams, leaning into the wall as the fragrance of all the nights and hours lying on the hay consume him. She’s still here. He can feel her pulling him to the bottom of the floor.

            He walks to the old tool shed in the back and pulls out a broom, beating the particles of moth and spider webs from the bristles, and starts on the inside of the barn, collecting all the wood pieces fallen in from the roof, all the rusted nails and age-baked manure, the pieces of barn rot and broken pails. As he sweeps out the mold and hay piles of wet straw and pebbled rocks, he sees a gold earring on the floor. It’s a brassy gold swirl with a reddish stone swinging from the bottom of the swirl. Henry holds it up to the sun falling through the caved-in roof and quietly sets it in his back pocket.

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Ann Minoff lived in the Midwest for twenty years.  In between working as an antique dealer, chiropractor, and  meditation instructor she wrote verse, short stories and a novel or two.  She moved to New York State and lives in a rural area with her dog, Emma, a beautiful German Shepherd with one lopsided ear.  Now she only writes and teaches yoga.