Harry's Trees

by Jon Cohen

  They’d all moo at once. “Going down good, Amanda!”

  “Amanda, how ya doing?”

  “Oh, hey, Amanda.” Oh, hey, Amanda. That would be Stu, trying to act casual.

  And Cliff? He could not speak Amanda’s name at all. It would get caught up around his epiglottis and sit there thickly until it emerged a full hour later, when he was in his pickup, a lonely bull heading home, lowing Amanda.

  Cliff was such a shy, inarticulate man he could get tongue-tied talking to a cow. He talked to them more than he should, and on days when chores overwhelmed, and he was so tired he saw spots (and not just on the cows), he imagined they talked back to him. On occasion, he’d speak to his day worker, Hoop Sloane.

  Cliff and Hoop could go for a week without talking. Neither man could confidently express his innermost thoughts, so why bother? Besides, they agreed on everything. Both men loved the smell of hay, loved to repair the electric paddock fences, even loved to troubleshoot the milking machines, which were fussy, especially on the dawn winter milkings. You did not want a vacuum pump to fail you in cold weather because without a constant, even pulse, the wet tip of a cow’s teat would rub raw in the teat cup and sometimes, if the pump failed altogether, even freeze. Cliff could not bear the plaintive moos of an uncomfortable cow.

  An only child, Cliff had inherited the dairy farm from his folks, both dead and buried in the family plot in Maplewood Cemetery. His dad had run the farm for forty years as a typical grain-feed operation with a hundred penned Holsteins, but Cliff cut back to fifty animals and switched to seasonal rotational grazing. Going organic was the thing to do these days—low maintenance, low cost, and best of all, the cows were much happier. You could see it in their eyes and hear it in their moos.

  “That’s a good moo,” Hoop would say, looking up from fixing a hinge on a stall door or adjusting a solar pump on one of the numerous water pipelines snaking over the rolling fields.

  An hour might go by before Cliff answered. “Yeah, that was a good moo.”

  Other men would surely devolve into extended cow riffs and moo jokes to pass the time, but that wasn’t Cliff’s and Hoop’s style.

  Cliff forced himself to go to Green Gables because you didn’t want to get out of the habit of being among two-legged creatures. Hoop had gotten out of the habit. He shaved without a mirror, leaving hairy tufts along his jawline, and on hot July days his body odor could stun.

  Cliff, though, made an effort to stay in the game, so after he got the cows milked and settled, he’d put on a clean shirt and sit down once or twice a week at the big oval Green Gables bar with Stu, Walter, Ronnie and whoever else might show up, and let Tom serve him a few. He was always the first to leave because his day began in the dawn dark.

  Hanging out with other guys was difficult enough for Cliff, but mingling with women was pure torture. He’d fiddled around some when he was younger, but somehow having fifty lives under his constant care—fifty-one if you counted Hoop—Cliff had placed too much life and time between himself and the fairer sex. He’d mulled over the intricacies of the mating dance for too long, and once you’ve done that, it all becomes impossibly complex and unattainable.

  Every woman you encounter you hoist up on a pedestal. And standing atop the tallest pedestal of all, with her arms crossed and her eyebrow warily raised—Amanda Jeffers, widow.

  * * *

  So when Amanda Jeffers showed up out of the blue two months ago he’d almost had a heart attack.

  That February day, Amanda was almost having a heart attack, too. She drove down the Grand Army of the Republic Highway in her truck to Cliff Blair’s dairy farm, because she was going to sleep with him. Her grip on the steering wheel tightened. She was definitely going to sleep with Cliff Blair. It was time to sleep with somebody. And Cliff, well, he was a pleasant, decent enough somebody. Amanda gripped the steering wheel hard enough to snap it in two. Oh man, she was so nervous.

  She glanced in the rearview mirror. Look at you, she thought. Nervous and frowning. You can’t go to Cliff’s and frown at the man. She forced a smile. Would he find her attractive, when it really came down to it? Not a woman who spent a lot of time gazing in mirrors, Amanda saw lines around her mouth and eyes she had never noticed before. She drew back. Amanda, what the hell are you doing? You got lines, big goddamn deal. Of course you have lines, you’re drying up like a drought-baked river. You need to get your juices flowing again. This isn’t just sex, it’s for your damn health, too.

  No. For Pete’s sake, it’s for the sex and you know it.

  It was a late afternoon, an unseasonably warm winter day, and Cliff sat on an old oak three-legged milking stool, hand-stripping a young cow that was suffering from mastitis. He’d inserted antibiotic into the teat canal using the short cannula method. The most important part of that method, he’d learned real quick as a kid, was dodging a cow’s kick that could send your head flying over to the next county.

  Cliff was trying to be gentle as he stripped the teats, but you did have to get a strong flow going. The tethered cow moaned and kicked out a few more times and finally settled with a shudder of relief. The milk had thick flakes in it and smelled sour from the antibiotic, but it would clear in about three days. He’d have to toss the milk of course, though some dairy farmers tried to sneak bad milk past the inspectors and ended up losing their Grade A. Fools.

  Cliff was alone in the barn. Hoop worked from 4:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m., and had gone home or wherever it was that Hoop went after leaving Cliff’s. Cliff listened to the milk hitting the side of the pail and the wind blowing through the bare trees of the mountains and the cow chewing her cud—all the sounds that were as much a part of him as the breath rising and falling from his own lungs.

  He tilted his head when he detected a different sound—the scrape of a stranger’s foot on the concrete floor of the barn.

  In the same heart-stopping instant, he detected, even among the powerful barn smells, the unmistakable scent of Amanda Jeffers. All the guys knew Amanda’s clean-soap smell, their noses tilting up slightly to sniff the air as she’d walk by the bar. But this wasn’t Green Gables, this was here. Still grasping a fistful of teat, Cliff whipped around.

  Amanda stood in the double-wide opening of the barn doors, the late-afternoon sun outlining her form and setting her swept-back hair aglow. She wore a pair of tight blue jeans that looked new, and a sweatshirt jacket open to a red cami (in this cold!). She turned a little, her body now in profile, lush curves and bright color framed in barn wood.

  Cliff almost fell off his stool. That he was able to speak was a miracle. “Well, hey, Amanda Jeffers.” He instantly thought, Dumbass, don’t say her name in full like that. She always teases you when you do it.

  But all she said was, “Hey, Cliff.”

  And Cliff thought, Uh-oh, big departure from the norm, what’s going on? What is she doing here?

  “Can I come in?”

  Like it was his house instead of a barn. Cliff willed himself to speak again. “Oh, sure, please.” And then a second miracle. He added, “Don’t forget to wipe your feet.”

  Amanda laughed, made a little show of wiping her feet on the barn floor and approached. She stopped about five feet away and gazed down at him. “You practicing for the Harford Fair?” There was an annual hand-milking contest at the fair, which could get comical, since all of the farmers had mechanical milkers and had mostly lost the knack. The retired quarry and lumber guys who had just an acre and a hobby cow and a few chickens, they’d win the contest, hands down every year.

  Cliff was trying to think of something to make Amanda laugh again, and his mind went blank. He gripped the teat like it was a lifeline and stared into the pail of milk.

  Amanda cleared her throat and said, “Looks like you got yourself a handful.”

  Which brought Cliff’s eyes right up to Amanda’s impressive chest, hovering above him like soft pi
llows where the gods might rest their heads.

  Resisting the urge to cross her arms, Amanda let him stare.

  Cliff jumped to his feet and willed his gaze to Amanda’s face, expecting to see remonstrance, but her smile was bigger than ever. “So, gee, hey. Amanda Jeffers.” He winced and shook his head.

  The swagger, which had been false anyway, left Amanda. Cliff saw it, her skin flushing, the slight panic in her eyes.

  “Everything okay?” he said.

  Amanda nodded and rubbed her arms. “Oh yeah, everything’s okay. I’m just a little nervous.”

  “Nervous?” he asked gently.

  “Excited nervous,” Amanda said almost in a whisper.

  Cliff stared at her. “Sorry?”

  Amanda got some gumption back into her voice. “I’m excited. To be here and everything.” She added, “Got a sitter for Oriana.”

  “A sitter, huh?” Cliff said.

  “One of the Hytner twins, Debbie, nice kid. Yep. But... I’m not really here to talk about the twins.”

  “Oh, okay.” Cliff had never stood this close to Amanda before. She was advancing incrementally, and he couldn’t back up because he was against a stall post. He began to mouth breathe. Behind him the tethered cow mooed softly, as if to whisper counsel.

  “We’ve always been friends, Cliff.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “And so, that being the case and all, I want to ask you a big, huge favor.”

  “Oh sure, anything.” Cliff gulped. Her breath smelled powerfully of spearmint gum. The minty freshness, her proximity, that red formfitting cami—it was just too much. Cliff felt a thickening down below and hoped to God that his work coat was concealing it. He could not look at her. Could not move.

  Amanda took a breath and reached out to touch his arm, but at the last second shyly took hold of the wood post beside his arm. “Okay, here goes,” she said. She fixed her eyes on his. “Cliff, I haven’t...been...with a man in almost a year. And so the favor I’m asking you is...well, you know what I’m asking.”

  Cliff nodded. It was less in affirmation than that his head felt unmoored from his shoulders, like a bobblehead doll.

  “But this offer’s conditional, Cliff. And the condition is, if you go inside your house and take a good, hot shower and scrub off that Eau de Cow you’re wearing—when you come out I’ll be waiting in your bed.”

  Cliff kept nodding.

  Amanda smiled. “Are there clean sheets on your bed?”

  “It’s Tuesday,” Cliff whispered hoarsely.

  “Yeah, it’s Tuesday...?”

  “Tuesday is change-the-sheets day.”

  Amanda reached up and touched the bristle of his strong jaw, and turned toward the door. She paused and looked back over her shoulder. “You coming, Clifford Blair?”

  Behind him, the cow mooed loudly and nosed Cliff forward. Amanda held out her unsteady hand. Cliff took it. Across the barnyard they went, toward the little white house on the hill. Cliff winced when Amanda suddenly squeezed his hand so tight he thought she might break the bones. He stole a peek at her, and she didn’t look excited or nervous anymore. She looked frighteningly determined. He stumbled, and she gripped him even harder and moved him along toward the house.

  In Cliff’s bedroom, each time she removed an article of clothing, Amanda paused to name a quality she admired in Cliff. “Good,” she said, stepping out of her jeans. “He’s a good man.” Showering, Cliff couldn’t hear her, the water was beating down too furiously. She could hear him, though, his big body bumping heavily against the plastic of the shower stall as he scrubbed himself. She imagined his hand soaping his shoulder and trembled.

  “Strong shoulders,” Amanda said in a softer voice, slipping off her red cami. She turned and looked in the faded oval mirror of an old dressing table. It would have belonged to Cliff’s mother, Mildred Blair. Amanda couldn’t imagine that Cliff ever looked at himself in it. She wasn’t a mirror person either, but she couldn’t resist looking at the strange, exciting sight of Amanda Jeffers standing in her bra and panties in Cliff Blair’s bedroom. She blushed because she’d purchased her underwear online from Amazon in anticipation of this moment. The package had arrived yesterday. The bra (Favorite Lacy Plunge Bra, bright peach) cost $33, plus shipping. The panties were turquoise, and boy, when they said Ultra Low Teeny Bikini, they meant it. Amanda placed a modest hand over her loins and then willed herself to remove it. She stood there in the center of the room. Should she get into Cliff’s bed or join him in the shower? She skittered over to the bed.

  In the shower, Cliff soaped himself all over for the third time. He wished he was washing with a bar of Irish Spring, something with a nice scent to it instead of this pale yellow no-name soap from Shop ’n Save. He made a mental note: ask Amanda what brand of soap smell she likes on her man. He gulped at his presumption: her man. This whole thing was so unlikely—showering for Amanda Jeffers who was right out there in his bedroom—that he stuck his head outside the shower curtain to make sure she had not run off in embarrassed regret. No, he could hear the creak of bedsprings. It was his parents’ bed, part of a matching walnut veneer bedroom set they’d proudly bought mail order from Sears in the late 1950s.

  The bed creaked again and he flinched, trying not to imagine his parents’ couplings. He’d lived in this house his entire life but had never heard the bed make a sound, although there had been a lot of groans and sighs drifting up the heat vents to his little third-floor room. But that was just Dad rising for the 4:30 a.m. milking.

  Cliff turned off the shower and peeped down at his nakedness. Oh gosh, he thought, shivering, would he be enough for her? Because boy, I mean, she’s on fire. When Amanda had taken hold of his hand and led him up to the house, he wondered if she was ill, there was such a fever to her flesh. She was revved up and ready to go. He prayed to God he could attend to her properly. He grabbed his towel, wrapped it around his waist, turned to the bathroom door and placed his hand on the chipped porcelain doorknob.

  Amanda, waiting in Cliff’s bed, saw the doorknob turn. She lay naked atop the soft quilt like an exquisite candy in a tufted box. When the door began to open and steam curled out into the room, it was as if Cliff had been conjured from the mists of her longing. Yikes, she thought, and wiggled under the quilt and clutched it to her chest like Granny in her bed as the wolf made his entrance.

  Standing in the open doorway, Cliff made a sheepish wolf, gripping his white towel to his waist even tighter than Amanda clutched her quilt. Cliff’s mom, Mildred, had made the quilt. Amanda, glancing at her form naughtily outlined beneath its log cabin block pattern, remembered it hanging in Textile Hall at the Harford Fair, Grand Prize winner, August 1988.

  She found the courage to speak. “Well, here I am, Cliff. Waiting in between your nice, clean Tuesday sheets.”

  Cliff stood frozen to the floorboards, three feet from the foot of the bed.

  Amanda gave him a little wave of her fingers like she was greeting him from her pickup truck as he stood outside Nicholson Hardware. “Hey, it’s just me.”

  Cliff gave a dazed little wave back with the hand that was holding up his too small towel. He fumbled for it, but Amanda was quicker. She reached out and pulled the towel free. Wearing nothing but his farmer’s tan, Cliff started to cover himself with his hand, but then stopped and stood there for her.

  Amanda looked him up and down. “Oh my God,” she breathed. “You’re really something.” She slowly peeled back the quilt and revealed herself to him.

  Cliff blinked and his mouth opened.

  “Come on, Cliff. Get in this bed before we both die of heart attacks.”

  Cliff couldn’t take his eyes off her. She was slightly thick around the waist, had an old appendectomy scar below her belly button and was blessed with the most beautiful breasts he had ever seen in his life. His admiration was not simply sexual—he was
impressed as a professional dairy man.

  Cliff floated on that thought to the memory of a painting he had happened on long ago while idly leafing through a dusty art history book in Pratt Public Library while Olive Perkins wasn’t looking: Tintoretto’s The Origin of the Milky Way. In it, Jupiter holds the infant Hercules to the breast of Juno, her milk spurting into the heavens to form the stars of the Milky Way. Cliff loved the idea that milk could be so essential to the order of the cosmos. In his excitement he had showed the picture to his dad, who was standing by the magazine rack reading a farm journal. His dad slapped him.

  Cliff got into the old Sears bed beside Amanda. She closed her eyes and pressed the entire length of her body into his, a goddess in his arms. She pulled him tighter and tighter into an embrace so powerful he could hardly breathe.

  * * *

  Afterward, Amanda wept. But she proceeded to have sex with Cliff four more times over the next few months. The encounters were a disorienting comfort.

  So now it was April. Today, at Cliff’s, Amanda felt uneasy. The arrival (and departure?) of Harry Crane had been disruptive. Something was certainly out of kilter, and she could not say exactly what it was. Cliff came out of the shower as usual. She was in his bed as usual. She was wanting comfort and contact and they were in bed and she was on her back and Cliff was hovering above her doing preliminary things and it was all going fine, but it wasn’t quite. Distracted, her eyes roamed the room and—

  That’s when she spotted it. Almost like the eye of a hawk, a tiny glittering rounded black dot where a black dot shouldn’t be—between two books on the dresser. It flickered.

  She froze. “What’s that?”

  Deep in the anticipation of pure pleasure, all set to go, Cliff murmured, “What?”

  She pointed at the dresser. Whatever that dot was, it began to seriously malfunction. It blinked madly.

  Amanda screamed and shoved Cliff off her. “What the hell is that?”