The Human Stain

Though Coleman probably used, all told, no more than the half cup of milk a day he poured over his morning cereal, he'd signed on with Organic Livestock as a three-gallon-a-week customer. Doing this allowed him to pick up his milk, fresh from the cow, right at the farm—to drive his car in from the road and down the long tractor path to the barn and to walk into the barn and get the milk cold out of the refrigerator. He'd arranged to do this not so as to be able to procure the price break extended to three-gallon customers but because the refrigerator was set just inside the entryway to the barn and only some fifteen feet from the stall where the cows were led in to be milked one at a time, twice a day, and where at 5 P.M. (when he showed up) Faunia, fresh from her duties at the college, would be doing the milking a few times a week.

All he ever did there was watch her work. Even though there was rarely anyone else around at that time, Coleman remained outside the stall looking in and let her get on with the job without having to bother to talk to him. Often they said nothing, because saying nothing intensified their pleasure. She knew he was watching her; knowing she knew, he watched all the harder—and that they weren't able to couple down in the dirt didn't make a scrap of difference.

It was enough that they should be alone together somewhere other than in his bed, it was enough to have to maintain the matter-of-factness of being separated by unsurpassable social obstacles, to play their roles as farm laborer and retired college professor, to perform consummately at her being a strong, lean working woman of thirty-four, a wordless illiterate, an elemental rustic of muscle and bone who'd just been in the yard with the pitchfork cleaning up from the morning milking, and at his being a thoughtful senior citizen of seventy-one, an accomplished classicist, an amplitudinous brain of a man replete with the vocabularies of two ancient tongues. It was enough to be able to conduct themselves like two people who had nothing whatsoever in common, all the while remembering how they could distill to an orgasmic essence everything about them that was irreconcilable, the human discrepancies that produced all the power. It was enough to feel the thrill of leading a double life.

There was, at first glance, little to raise unduly one's carnal expectations about the gaunt, lanky woman spattered with dirt, wearing shorts and a T-shirt and rubber boots, whom I saw in with the herd that afternoon and whom Coleman identified as his Voluptas.

The carnally authoritative-looking creatures were those with the bodies that took up all the space, the creamy-colored cows with the free-swinging, girderlike hips and the barrel-wide paunches and the disproportionately cartoonish milk-swollen udders, the unagitated, slow-moving, strife-free cows, each a fifteen-hundred-pound industry of its own gratification, big-eyed beasts for whom chomping at one extremity from a fodder-filled trough while being sucked dry at the other by not one or two or three but by four pulsating, untiring mechanical mouths—for whom sensual stimulus simultaneously at both ends was their voluptuous due. Each of them deep into a bestial existence blissfully lacking in spiritual depth: to squirt and to chew, to crap and to piss, to graze and to sleep—that was their whole raison d'être. Occasionally (Coleman explained to me) a human arm in a long plastic glove is thrust into the rectum to haul out the manure and then, by feeling with the glove through the rectal wall, guides the other arm in inserting a syringelike breeding gun up the reproductive tract to deposit semen. They propagate, that means, without having to endure the disturbance of the bull, coddled even in breeding and then assisted in delivery-and in what Faunia said could prove to be an emotional process for everyone involved—even on below-zero nights when a blizzard is blowing. The best of carnal everything, including savoring at their leisure mushy, dripping mouthfuls of their own stringy cud. Few courtesans have lived as well, let alone workaday women.

Among those pleasured creatures and the aura they exuded of an opulent, earthy oneness with female abundance, it was Faunia who labored like the beast of burden for all that she seemed, with the cows framing her figure, one of evolution's more pathetic flyweights.