On an Independence Day, I sat down on the pew of a small country church. A few minutes into the service, a tall grey-haired man stepped deliberately up to the microphone. Cupping a harmonica with his aged hands, he played patriotic fare in celebration of the holiday.
The familiar sound filling the sanctuary carried me back to my childhood to serenades of my daddy's French harp, as he used to call it. Even though I had never met the grey-haired man named Henry, I endeared him right then and there.
In the months and years that followed, a friendship and kinship evolved with both Henry and his wife Kay. He invited me to join the gospel group he played with on Thursday nights at a rehab center. Sometimes in their living room the three of us broke out in song as Kay, the church organist, mastered the piano, Henry harmonica-nized and I strummed my guitar. If not absorbed in "I'll Fly Away" or "Keep on the Sunny Side," we relaxed in plastic chairs in a shed by Henry's barn swapping tomato tales and stories from our pasts.
More than once (as though it was the first time) Henry told me about trading a rabbit for a harmonica when he was a young boy and learning to play "Oh! Susanna" on the way home. At the end of my visits to his farm, he always walked me to my car and repeated the same warning (as though it was the first time) about a place up the road where oncoming traffic is obscured by a hill, in the same manner as Daddy used to tell me to lock my car doors every time I drove away (before car doors locked automatically).
In the springtime when flowers began putting on a show, Henry and Kay came over to my house to see the rhododendrons and mountain laurels spawned by my husband's green thumb. On one particular visit when we stood chatting in the yard, an uninvited guest in the form of a black snake sashayed its way into the conversation. This was no little snake, mind you, but a full-grown lengthy rascal.
I told my friends I preferred to let the nonpoisonous black snakes roam. I also added I would rather not have one so close to the house. On that cue, long-legged slow-walking Henry strode over to the snake, grabbed hold of it barehanded, and twirled it in circles above his head like a cowboy about to lasso a longhorn at a Texas rodeo.
After a few rambunctious twirls, Henry let go of the snake. It shot through the air toward the woods and landed on a top log of our wooden fence, where it clung for dear life. In a final good riddance, Henry snatched it a second time and hurled it again into the wild green forest. By then the snake knew it had worn out its welcome and slithered through fallen dead leaves out of sight, leaving us to resume our tour of blossoms and springtime foliage.
That might have been the last reptile Henry tangled with. He was in his mid-eighties by then and as the years pressed on, age began bearing down on him full force. In spite of his resistance, it finally wrangled him away a few months ago, after he had tackled 91 years piling up on him the same way he manhandled a snake -- without flinching.
Published in The Goochland Gazette August 25, 2022.