The Human Stain

Calling them to come out from the open shed where they were reposefully sprawled in a mix of hay and shit—"Let's go, Daisy, don't give me a hard time. C'mon now, Maggie, that's a good girl. Move your ass, Flossie, you old bitch"—grabbing them by the collar and driving and cajoling them through the sludge of the yard and up one step onto the concrete floor of the milking parlor, shoving these cumbersome Daisys and Maggies in toward the trough until they were secure in the stanchion, measuring out and pouring them each their portion of vitamins and feed, disinfecting the teats and wiping them clean and starting the milk flow with a few jerks of the hand, then attaching to the sterilized teats the suction cups at the end of the milk claw, she was in motion constantly, fixed unwaveringly on each stage of the milking but, in exaggerated contrast to their stubborn docility, moving all the time with a beelike adroitness until the milk was streaming through the clear milk tube into the shining stainless-steel pail, and she at last stood quietly by, watching to make certain that everything was working and that the cow too was standing quietly. Then she was again in motion, massaging the udder to be sure the cow was milked out, removing the teat cups, pouring out the feed portion for the cow she would be milking after undoing the milked cow from the stanchion, getting the grain for the next cow in front of the alternate stanchion, and then, within the confines of that smallish space, grabbing the milked cow by the collar again and maneuvering her great bulk around, backing her up with a push, shoving her with a shoulder, bossily telling her, "Get out, get on out of here, just get—" and leading her back through the mud to the shed.

Faunia Farley: thin-legged, thin-wristed, thin-armed, with clearly discernible ribs and shoulder blades that protruded, and yet when she tensed you saw that her limbs were hard; when she reached or stretched for something you saw that her breasts were surprisingly substantial; and when, because of the flies and the gnats buzzing the herd on this close summer day, she slapped at her neck or her backside, you saw something of how frisky she could be, despite the otherwise straight-up style. You saw that her body was something more than efficiently lean and severe, that she was a firmly made woman precipitously poised at the moment when she is no longer ripening but not yet deteriorating, a woman in the prime of her prime, whose fistful of white hairs is fundamentally beguiling just because the sharp Yankee contour of her cheeks and her jaw and the long unmistakably female neck haven't yet been subject to the transformations of aging.

"This is my neighbor," Coleman said to her when she took a moment to wipe the sweat from her face with the crook of her elbow and to look our way. "This is Nathan."

I hadn't expected composure. I was expecting someone openly angrier. She acknowledged me with no more than a jerk of her chin, but it was a gesture from which she got a lot of mileage. It was a chin from which she got a lot of mileage. Keeping it up as she normally did, it gave her—virility. That was in the response too: some-thing virile and implacable, as well as a little disreputable, in that dead-on look. The look of someone for whom both sex and betrayal are as basic as bread. The look of the runaway and the look that results from the galling monotony of bad luck. Her hair, the golden blond hair in the poignant first stage of its unpreventable permutation, was twisted at the back through an elastic band, but a lock kept falling toward her eyebrow as she worked, and now, while silently looking our way, she pushed it back with her hand, and for the first time I noticed in her face a small feature that, perhaps wrongly, because I was searching for a sign, had the effect of something telling: the convex fullness of the narrow arch of flesh between the ridge of eyebrow and the upper eyelids. She was a thinlipped woman with a straight nose and clear blue eyes and good teeth and a prominent jaw, and that puff of flesh just beneath her eyebrows was her only exotic marking, the only emblem of allure, something swollen with desire. It also accounted for a lot that was unsettlingly obscure about the hard flatness of her gaze.

In all, Faunia was not the enticing siren who takes your breath away but a clean-cut-looking woman about whom one thinks, As a child she must have been very beautiful. Which she was: according to Coleman, a golden, beautiful child with a rich stepfather who wouldn't leave her alone and a spoiled mother who wouldn't protect her.