tiny head bobbing forth and back as if he’s counting each step he takes in his head, both arms rigid and loaded down with heavy suitcases containing pamphlets and bibles.
“Bud!” shouts Harley and Bud looks as they come abreast of Happy Henry and Harley horks out a truly incredibly large membrane of green-grey mucous which slides out as if in slow motion, hovers and flaps in the air for a moment till caught by the wind, then is sent splatting and wrapping itself around the head of Happy Henry, whose suitcases go thudding to the earth as his hands fly to his face and Harley and Bud howl with brotherly delight as Henry’s frantic figure goes shrinking into the distance.
And in the front Momma Simpson still goes on about the bump and the cancer and Daddy Jack just sighs from time to time, squinting into the sun’s bright glare sending a white fuzz shooting into our eyes despite the visor flap, but you get the idea Daddy Jack doesn’t even hear Momma Simpson anymore just by the way he smokes his cigarette, and in a minute he starts talking in the middle of one of her sentences in a quiet, thinking kind of way.
“Ya see that bird on that sign up there?”—the sign says TRAILERS FOR RENT—“Well my dad coulda not only seen that bird, he coulda tol’ ye what kind of a bird it was, not only from the distance we just were, but from a good half-mile back more ’n that,” he mutters.
And now Momma Simpson is silent, like he isn’t interrupting what she was saying, like she can’t even remember talking in the first place. She watches the bird as Daddy Jack blows out a big cloud of cigarette smoke and stubs his cigarette in the ashtray.
“When he was seventy-nine he could see things even more farther away than I ever could, way out to hell and back. ‘Jack,’ he’d say, ‘can you see the colour a that pickup goin’ down the fifth line?’ Well, I’ll be goddamned if I could…” Daddy Jack says, more like he’s talking to himself, or to somebody else who isn’t even here. “Seventy-nine, never wore glasses a day in his life. Now that was a man who really could see.”
Happy Henry
And what of Happy Henry, spindly fingers now blindly clawing Harley’s mucous off his face by the highway on this cool April morning? He murmurs and simpers little mmf sounds to himself and now a wrinkled tissue is drawn from his overcoat pocket to dispatch the mess. He shakes his head in puzzlement and bends for the suitcases, his Salvation Army shoes encased in plastic bread bags for protection skiffling in the gravel as he resumes his pilgrimage, this rabbit-faced disciple of the Lord, his little grey teeth overhanging his thin lower lip.
He trudges and his undersized head glistening with grease slicking back his short black hair—as if his whole head’s been dipped in a vat of oil—resumes its loping pendulum swing. His beady eyes aglow, he stumbles down the lonely morning highway, cars and transport trucks roaring past and whipping him around in their wake and slipstreams of exhaust and dust and ricocheting stones. The tails of his overcoat ruffle, ol’ Happy Henry known for miles around, you might see him on the highway, you might see him crossing a distant field, sailing through a sea of weeds, or ambling down a quiet side street in the town, in the night, his shadow passing beneath the beam of a streetlight, darkness and silence all around.
He may accost you in the drugstore or in the barbershop, his shy hesitant smiling face, his stuttering lisping voice asking, “Hello? How are you today?”—for everything he says is said like a question. He blinks and before you know it a pamphlet is being passed into your hand.
ETERNITY IS FOREVER—a picture of the sky: fluffy, white clouds and behind one of them a little piece of the sun peeking around—long lines stretching out from it, reaching to the edge of the paper. HAVE YOU MADE YOUR CHOICE? Inside, WHERE WILL YOU SPEND ETERNITY? IN HEAVEN OR IN HELL?
“Some reading material—for free,” says Happy Henry, smiling and bowing slightly, nodding his head towards the pamphlet as you stand there, and as you stuff it into your pocket and thank him, planning to discreetly dispose of it later.
As you turn and depart from him, he stands still behind you, nodding his head and regarding you with glowing eyes—joyful, envying the happiness you will know when you later privately read the pamphlet and its true meaning washes over you, when the glory of the Lord’s love rains down over your heart and the truth of your redemption paid for with the price of God’s only begotten son detonates across your consciousness and you are truly cleansed in the blood of the lamb.
Yes, Henry knows and anticipates the bounteous future awakening, which will take place, and most of all your incredible surprise at discovering that you are the personal receiver of the greatest gift that has ever been given—Henry’s benevolent head nodding, ushering you into that most beautiful and incomprehensible sanctuary, the universe a compassionate womb in love with you forever—If only you don’t drink or smoke or use curse words, Henry thinks with a stern frown, his brow furrowing.
He strides down the highway up to Barker’s Corner, to the gas station with the all-night coffee shop attached, loping up across the parking lot with an energetic spring quickening in his long bony legs. In the front window of the coffee shop three men sit huddled around a table, their coffee cups half-filled before them, their elbows resting on the table and their large boots on the floor resting in gloppy puddles of mud. They wear thick, grey, mud-spattered jackets and hats emblazoned with the logos of various tractor and farm implement manufacturers.
One of the men sits sucking on a pipe that periodically goes out, necessitating that he continually relight it—the ashtray before him filled with blackened matches. The man sitting across from him looks out the window and sees Henry limping his way across the lot.
“Well here comes ol’ Henry,” he chuckles, his eyes darting across to the other two men.
“That’s right. There he is, Roy,” drawls the pipe-smoker, “on his way to make another new convert, I suspect.”
“Heh, heh,” chuckles Roy. “Don’t suspect there’s any likelihood on ’im makin’ a fresh one outta you, eh Gus?”
“Oh, Henry knows me all right,” says the other fellow laconically. “I ’magine by this time he knows he’d be barkin’ up the wrong tree tryin’ to get somewhere with me.”
Roy laughs, and the other fellow, an older man with weary, watery eyes chuckles as well as Henry throws open the door of the coffee shop and stumbles in, having a bit of trouble with his sizable suitcases. The middle-aged woman behind the cash register looks up with a bemused smile and the men sitting at the table all turn to him, nod, “How y’doin’, Henry?” winking at each other, then return to their conversation.
A newspaper lies on the table in the midst of them, The Wigford Gazette, with its tale on the front page of how a discarded refrigerator had been found in a ditch by a sideroad twenty miles out of town the night before, and in the refrigerator was discovered a partially decomposed human body.
“Jesus Christ!” cries Roy. “How d’ya like that? Jesus, somethin’ like that ain’t happened round here since… well Christ, since ol’ Ferguson on the first line did ’is wife in. I ’member that from when I was a kid—musta been forty years ago.”
“Yeah, yep, that’s right, Roy, I ’member that, sure. Ol’ Ferguson he’d been married, what, twenty years to the same woman, came home one night and put an axe right through her head,” nods the fellow with wet, weary eyes, his voice soft and untroubled. “Didn’t seem to be no rhyme nor reason to it, never a hint there was anything wrong. Just got off work at the gravel pit, came home and put an ax right through ’er head.”
“Jesus,
