The Cheese Maker
It was easier than she’d thought to learn the quick twist of the wrist and delicate but firm pull that produced the buckets of milk. She liked the entire process: the soft light from the single bulb hanging high near the ceiling, the animal warmth of the barn, the smell of the sweet, grass-hay, the closeness of the cow as they leaned into each other, her cheek against the cow’s rough coat smelling of dust and dried dung, the hiss of milk in the pans. It took longer to get used to the isolation.
George’s farm was snugged high against the round-headed mountain, seated comfortably on a shelf of grassland and woods. From the top of the pasture behind the barn she could see the mountain range slipped away to the east, a series of dark hills against the sky. She found a boulder with an indent where she could rest out of the wind, her hands tucked into the pockets of her heavy jacket. She focused on the drifting clouds and watched the hawks circling above the valley. In Williston, the only birds she’d been aware of were sparrows and robins, dull through familiarity. Here, the small birds were secretive, keeping to the woods and dark patches of underbrush. When she saw them flitting quickly over the pasture, she imagined them looking over one wing with a bright eye on the sky, as aware of the hawks as she. She could have wished for neighbors close enough to visit, but never doubted her decision.
From the half dozen letters she’d exchanged with him, she knew George made cheese, but it hadn’t meant much to her. She knew cheese came from cows, the same way she knew eggs came from chickens. But she soon found the steps from cow to cheese wheel were vastly more involved than sauntering to the hen house with a basket on her arm. Cheese making was as precise and as absorbing as doing up a new dress. She loved dipping a finger into the warmed second-day milk to test the rennet set. “Milk should be firm enough so your finger comes out just about clean,” George said. He was a good teacher, his reticence seemingly eased by the cheese-making process. She found stirring the curd with her bare hands even more satisfying, reaching down up to her elbows to the bottom of the pot, gently lifting, palm wide, then rolling her hand over and letting it sink back through the solidifying creamy milk. She liked the cleanliness of the process, and realized one day as she watched George rinse out the pots that he hadn’t made a special effort to clean the house for her arrival. It was the way he lived.
Once she knew what to do, George left her alone. Even when he was in the same room, they rarely talked and when they did it was day-to-day things. “Never found talking did me much good,” he once said. In his letters, single sheets torn from a penny notebook, she learned most of what she knew of him: that he’d never been married, was born in Oklahoma in nineteen aught four, ten years before she was, and that he had flat feet “so they didn’t want me for the war”. Reading between the lines, a phrase her father had used about news stories, she had intuited George’s steadiness, his honesty, his willingness to work hard. He wrote that he had built the cabin by himself, built the herd from two to ten, had some savings in the bank, didn’t think he was all that good looking, but was respectable. It wasn’t much, but it had been enough.
She’d known everything about Ned. They had whispered to each other behind their books in grade school and began holding hands in seventh grade. They were married two months after their eighteenth birthdays. The ripe-peach bride and nervous, grinning groom.
When Helen’s father died, Ned took over the hardware store. However, he wasn’t handy with tools, saying it was something you were born with, like having brown eyes. It wasn’t until he was dead that she discovered that he wasn’t a businessman either, or even a truthful person. He’d lied to her about money in the bank they didn’t have and about a future he didn’t believe in. Her reaction, finding him sprawled over his desk at the store, his head bloody and the gun fallen from his hand, was relief that no child of theirs would have to live with the shame.