The Lay of the Land- Henry

6/10/2015

The Lay of the Land

By Lyn Messersmith

Henry

            Henry gave me cowboy boot earrings for my high school graduation. I loved them best of all my gifts, and wore them often. They were carved from wood, with sparkly blue stones in the center of a star on the boot tops, and reminded me of fancy styles I used to beg Dad to order in the Blucher catalog.

            What became of the earrings is a mystery. Surely I wouldn’t have given, or thrown them away, but they are gone, and I don’t even know when they disappeared. Sort of like Henry, when he drifted out of my life.

            Henry was a strange bird. His eyes had a wild look; the gray gaze shifted on you, then away, as if looking for an escape route, a look I grew to recognize years later, as a mental health worker. He reminded me of a bronc, undecided whether to buck or bolt; rear or roll, always unpredictable.  The man likely needed to be on medication, although in those days mental illness wasn’t treated outside of institutions, where lobotomies and shock treatments were the norm.

            But it wasn’t a big deal; everyone knew Henry was “a little crazy.” He floated around the country working here and there, and probably stayed longer at our place than most. My dad felt sorry for Henry, but he wouldn’t have lasted long with us if he hadn’t been a good worker.

The only thing that riled Dad about the situation was writing Henry’s check to our neighbor, who was his sister. The sister and her husband were salt of the earth folks who no doubt had Henry’s best interests at heart, but Dad hated the way Henry never had money of his own; only what was doled out to him for cigarettes, a paperback western, or new jeans, and gas for the rattletrap car he drove to his sister’s house on Saturday nights so she could do his laundry. When he left our yard, check in hand, Dad shook his head and growled that a man in mid-life deserved more respect.

Henry was clean, polite, and quieter than most of our hired hands, except when telling about the adventures of the Daltons, Younger Brothers, James gang, or Doc Middleton. He read a lot and was fascinated with outlaw tales, but that’s understandable, for someone who hasn’t much personal freedom.

There was this other thing about Henry. He loved to dance, and was good at it. In those days families went to public dances together, and teens usually rode with their parents, because few of the younger set had access to wheels. 

I was kind of a wallflower until the last couple of years of school, when I acquired a steady boyfriend, but every girl knew she’d dance with her dad, and the dads of her friends, as well as a hired man or two, as long as they were appropriately sober. Those men, including my boyfriend, were all good dancers, but none was as smooth as Henry.

I still smile, remembering how he’d show up, hand outstretched to me, every time the band struck up Rock Around the Clock. I didn’t care a whit what my friends thought of me out on that dance floor cutting a rug with a wild eyed, gray haired old guy.

“Who was that?” a classmate asked, after one of our capers.

“Oh, that’s just Henry,” I said. “He works for my dad.”

I’ll never solve the mystery of the missing earrings, and until recently, I didn’t know what became of Henry, but last winter I crossed paths with two of his nieces and during our trip down memory lane learned that some years after leaving our community, he took his own life.
           I think of those pretty earrings every year about graduation time. Maybe I give Henry too much credit for finding something that would please a skinny tomboy who was part outlaw, like the heroes in his dime novels. Maybe his sister picked them out. But no, she’d have chosen something more ladylike.  These were too—well, too Henry. That look of satisfaction when I opened the box and put them on; I get it now. For once, he had done something on his own

It’s a bittersweet memory, the way Henry used to swing me out on the dance floor; both of us conscious of nothing but the rhythm. So long ago, when I was naïve, and believed that easy kind of joy would last forever, but he took happiness by the hand when the music began, knowing it never does.