Four Dead Horses

by KT Sparks

  “Great,” said Martin. “We moved her downstairs.”

  Julie handed the plate to Martin, unzipped her coat, shook it off, and tossed it over the staircase landing, where it settled like a well-felled polar bear. Though she no longer appeared as if she were encased in bubble wrap, Martin still found himself staring at her bulk. He was positive she had not been this heavy when he saw her at The Silver Dollar last September.

  Frank skidded down from the second floor, flinging himself over Julie’s coat.

  “Who’s your fa—-?” He reared back, stared open-mouthed at Julie. “Julie? Shit.” He laughed, stopped. “Shit.”

  “Sixty pounds since school started in September, almost one hundred since I graduated PPHS, okay?” she said, catching and holding Martin’s eye.

  “No, that’s fine. That’s great. Good to see you.” Frank slithered to the doorway to the den. “I’m going to Ron’s,” he said and vanished.

  Martin stared at Julie for a minute more.

  “Mom’s asleep, but she’ll want to see you,” he said finally. “Do you want a cup of coffee, or…?” The grandfather clock in the den struck eight, as if correcting Martin. He waited until it was done. “…or a drink, a beer, or some brandy?”

  “Brandy would be good,” said Julie and followed Martin to the kitchen. She sat down at the dinner table and took the foil off the plate to reveal a pile of lumpy cookies in the shapes of holly leaves and Santa hats. She picked up one and pushed the rest away. Martin retrieved two brandy snifters from the bar in the den as well as a three-quarters full bottle of Christian Brothers. He set the glasses down and splashed some in each. Julie gestured for more. He poured her a second measure and took a cookie too. Julie picked up her brandy snifter with both hands and stared into it.

  “I left school,” said Julie, picking out another cookie and licking the green frosting from its top. “In October.”

  Martin put down his cinnamon-ball-encrusted reindeer and took a small sip of the brandy. It burned the back of his throat, evaporated before he could swallow.

  “How’s your mom?” Martin said.

  “Good,” said Julie. “No. I don’t know. She’s a bitch. We don’t talk. I made these fucking cookies, you know. Her best friend in there,” Julie waved toward the living room, “dying in the room with the Christmas tree, which is weird by the way, and Mom doesn’t even bother to sign her Christmas card.”

  The Newports’ card had come a couple of days before, a cardinal on a snow-covered pine branch, “Season’s Greetings” scrolling on the top, inside, stamped in gold, “Best Wishes For a Happy Holidays and a Healthy New Year, the Newport Family.” Martin remembered thinking it was kind of classy, the custom printing. He had not understood that the name stamp was sending a message, not of Christmas cheer, but of social distancing.

  They chewed and sipped for several more minutes, until Martin could bear the teeth clicks and throat gurgles no longer. “What have you been up to since you’ve been back?” he asked. He knew he sounded like an out-of-town aunt making conversation with a niece she had met only twice before, but he couldn’t seem to control the platitudes spilling from his sugar-frosted lips.

  “Therapy,” said Julie. “Can I have another shot?”

  He poured the drink and topped off his own.

  “Therapy,” he said. “Physical?”

  “Mental,” she answered. “My mom thinks I have an eating disorder.”

  It had begun over Columbus Day, when Bitsy Newport and her husband, Winnie, surprised Julie at U of M’s parents’ weekend. They had found her on the lawn of the Phi Kappa Alpha house, representing her newly pledged sorority, Delta Sigma Theta, in the pizza-eating contest, which she won handily, two pies in seven minutes thirty-two seconds, a campus record. She downed two cans of Budweiser while the other contestants chewed it out for second place, an act of poor sportsmanship, but not so bad that it warranted Bitsy’s tremolo scream as Julie, tomato sauce smeared on her chin, crushed the second empty on her head.

  “They drove me straight to the psych ward at Swinehurst,” Julie explained. “They’ve got a floor for eating disorders now. It’s quite the rage. I think Mom thought I could catch one, like the flu. She told the shrink that the problem wasn’t that I binge, which I do, but that I don’t purge. The problem is, that I am fat, and Bitsy Newport does not have fat children. She wants me to be bulimic, or even better, anorexic, because it’s less messy. The first doc, the one that admitted me, yelled at her. Said she was the one who should be in the loony bin. Said don’t you know how serious eating disorders are? People die. Look at Karen Carpenter. Mom told him that Karen Carpenter was lovely—by which she means skeletal—and she would have been fine had she had someone to help her manage her situation. Anyway, she got me this other shrink, not even a doctor, like a guru nutritionist scam artist who wants me to meditate with him and eat only vegetables. I go three times a week and he plays bells and I nap and he draws up a menu, which I take home, and my mom serves me lettuce rolls and rice cakes, and I smile and eat them and then I go to Dunkin Donuts and get two boxes of donut holes for my ride to Beamers Liquors to buy peppermint schnapps, Jack Daniels, and People Magazine to keep me company in my room until I pass out.”

  “Martin, who’s there?” Dottie’s voice floated into the kitchen, as strong and clear as he had heard it in months. “Is it Bitsy? Bring her to me.”

  “Let’s go,” Julie said and picked up her glass. “It’s me, Mrs. Oliphant. Julie.” She took a step, hesitated, turned back, grabbed the bottle. “Do you think your mom will want some?”

  “God, no,” Martin said, also rising from the table. “She’s barely had a sip of water in the last week.”

  Dottie leaned in the doorway between the living room and the kitchen and said, “Don’t be silly.” She clutched both sides of the raised doorframe, and the veins on her hands popped like blue twigs tossed on white tissue paper. Her pale peach nightgown drifted to her feet, as if it were suspended from the ceiling by fishing line, no substructure of body holding it up from underneath. But she was standing, somehow having extracted herself from Mount St. Hospital Bed, and she was smiling.

  “Get me a glass, Martin,” Dottie said, “and let Bitsy come with me to the living room.”

  Martin fetched the glass. Julie disappeared with the bottle and her own snifter. By the time Martin joined them, his mom was back in the bed and showing Julie, who had pulled up one of the club chairs, how the morphine pump worked.

  “Bitsy was telling me how she was thinking about applying to the nursing program at Lake Michigan University,” said Dottie. “Isn’t that exciting?”

  Martin raised an eyebrow at Julie. She shrugged. “Pour your mom a drink.”

  “Yes, Martin, do,” said Dottie, “and then leave us to catch up.”

  Martin poured the drink but held onto it. “You think? With the drugs?” he said. Julie smirked and waved a hand.

  Dottie said, “She is a nurse, you know.”

  Martin handed the glass to Julie, who set it on the retractable table. “This is Julie, Mom. Julie Newport, Bitsy’s daughter. She’s not a nurse. Or a future nurse.” He poked Julie’s back. She turned, frowned, and waved him off again.

  Dottie halted her brandy snifter in mid-heft, set it back down. She leaned over the table toward Julie, who leaned in. Dottie placed a hand on Julie’s cheek and blinked.

  “Well, so it is. Little Julie. I’m sorry, my dear, but you are so like your mother. So beautiful. So very, very beautiful.”

  With that, Julie started to sob and didn’t stop until they all consumed two more brandies and decided that Julie would stay at the Oliphants’ at least through the holidays.

  “Good night, Bitsy,” Dottie whispered, right before her eyes, dulled and heavy with booze and opiates, shut. “We’ll talk more in the morning.”

  Author’s Preface, Songs of the Cowbo
ys by Jack Thorpe, 1908

  To the Ranchmen of the West this little volume is dedicated as a reminder of the trail days and round-ups of the past. To the younger generation, who know not of the trip from Texas to Dodge and the north, it will tend to keep alive the memories of an industry now past.

  I have gathered these songs from the cow camps of different states and territories. They embrace most of the songs as sung by the old-time cow punchers. I plead ignorant of the authorship of them but presume that most of the composers have, ’ere now, “Gone up the dim narrow trail.”

  I mount this little book on one of the best cow horses that ever lived and start it on its journey; together may they meet all the old-time cowboys and receive a welcome at their hands, is the earnest wish of

  THE AUTHOR.

  8

  Julie slept on the living room couch that first night and the next morning returned to the Newports’ beach mansion to retrieve her things. The rest of the Newports had already left for their Christmas trip to Aspen to ski the peaks of Snowmass, so Julie’s run home was unmarked by any family fracas. She picked up her clothes, a couple of Harlequin romances, and a battered stuffed pink elephant she had had since she was two. From the idling Oldsmobile in the driveway, Martin watched her shut the door on the childhood home she would not enter again until six years later, when she would be married on its wooden deck overlooking Lake Michigan.

  Carroll, accustomed as he was to having strangers appear in the house and take residence, seemed not to note Julie’s occupation of the master bedroom recently abandoned by Dottie. Frank grumbled about “fatties taking over the world” when he was home, which was hardly at all. Dottie reacted most positively, sitting up, eating, chatting as she hadn’t for weeks. About half the time, she confused Julie with Bitsy and demanded details about a long-forgotten or never-happened tennis round robin at the club or the menu for this year’s cotillion. But Julie rolled with it, sitting by Dottie’s bedside for hours at a time, calming the dazed and dying woman as she slipped seamlessly between ego and alter ego.

  On her third day in residence, Julie found the Songs of the Cowboys in a hamper she had taken from Martin’s room. She had started doing their laundry. Martin imagined that described well the depth of her desire not to return to the Newport house. She presented the book to him at the dinner table that night.

  “This is that stuff, you know. From The Silver Dollar and the ranch. The poetry. It was in your dirty underwear.”

  Martin flushed. “Cowboy poetry. It’s cowboy poetry. Beaufort Giles, from Jimmy Sneedle’s, sent it.”

  “You had a thing for his daughter, what was her name? Clover? Sugar? Something culinary like that?”

  Martin couldn’t believe he’d forgotten about the book. Julie put it down beside her plate.

  “It’s pretty good. I read some to your mom this afternoon. She liked it. Especially the poems about horses. There’s one called “Chopo,” I think, that she made me read about ten times.”

  You’ve good judgment, sure footed, wherever you go,

  You’re a safety conveyance, my little Chopo.

  “Safety conveyance, that cracks me up. I practically have the thing memorized.”

  “Hmm,” Martin answered. He hadn’t heard the poem before. And he hadn’t read the book yet, which wasn’t really his fault. Not with all the upheaval lately. But he found he didn’t like Julie reciting cowboy poetry. And maybe he didn’t even like his mom enjoying cowboy poetry. He considered for a moment that Beaufort had said he was sending the book to provide comfort to his mom, but she hadn’t been the one who’d performed at the ranch. And Julie wasn’t the one who’d stripped bare and proclaimed cowboy poetry from the stage at The Silver Dollar. What had they risked for it?

  He thought it, but he didn’t say it. He couldn’t think how to and not sound small, selfish, a tad insane. And that was the opposite of what the art form promised.

  That night, he refused the snifter of brandy Julie poured for him. She shrugged, pushed the book across the counter, picked up her drink, and retired to the basement to watch A Chipmunk Christmas. From the easy chair in the den, where he withdrew to read, he could hear Alvin and the other weasels piping out “Silver Bells.”

  There are only twenty-three poems and fifty pages in the 1908 version of Songs of the Cowboys. Martin read them all in less than an hour. Devoured them like he was a starving coyote, and they were a slow-moving pack of disoriented shih tzus. In that short time, they sang to him of the loss and hope and sadness and joy of his twenty-one-and-three-quarters years: He sobbed for his mother as “our little Texas stray—poor wrangler Joe” was crushed to death by a herd of stampeding cattle. He jigged with the Dutchman, the Cornishman, and the “Johnny Bull from Leeds” at “The Cowboys New Year’s Dance.” He struggled through that fetid summer with the hunters on “Buffalo Range” and raged with them against the perfidy of a boss who would not pay, at a world that did not recognize hard work, at a land that defeated the best efforts of “all able-bodied men.” He glowed with admiration for “my chico Chopo” and felt closer to his mom because she had discovered the pony. He forgave Julie and his mother for reading the little book first, for loving it too. How could he not?

  He rose from the chair and, with the book, walked into the living room, where Dottie slept, bathed in lights from the Christmas tree, the same red, green, and gold that colored the falling snow outside. He kissed her cheek then retreated to the kitchen and picked up the glass of brandy Julie had poured for him earlier. He hesitated, then picked up the bottle too and descended into the dark of the basement to join Julie on the couch, just in time to hear Perry Como sing “I Saw Three Ships” with the concussed-looking chipmunk. She scooted over, and he spread out into the warm she left.

  On Christmas night, Martin stood at the end of his mom’s bed, its retractable table open and positioned before him. He looked down at the book, propped against a cup of eggnog, and read:

  Way out in Western Texas, where the Clear Forks waters flow,

  Where the cattle are a brewin’ and the Spanish ponies grew,

  “That doesn’t rhyme,” said Frank. He sat cross-legged under the Christmas tree, fiddling with a warty, canary-yellow Sony Walkman.

  “No doubt the result of the evolution of the Western idiom and pronunciation patterns,” said Lattner from one of the club chairs. A bottle of 1979 La Mission Haut-Brion sat on the occasional table next to him, one of four he had brought to the celebration. Another hung loosely in Carroll’s hand, and he slugged from it occasionally as he leaned in the doorway between hall and living room. The emerald pulse from Dottie’s drug pump infused Lattner’s balloon glass, and stars of flashing green danced across the ruby liquor. Julie, eyes half shut, leaned back in a chair pulled up next to the hospital bed and mouth-breathed regularly, a comforting background soundtrack. Bits and pieces of the remains of dinner perfumed the air: roasted turkey, yeast rolls, a tang of cranberry, a frizzle of burnt chocolate.

  “You go on, Martin. You’re doing a good job,” said Mrs. Trinkle from her seat opposite Lattner.

  Martin looked down at the page. He should have memorized it. But “The Cowboys’ Christmas Ball” was one of the longest poems in Songs of the Cowboys, and there had been so much to do. Getting several days’ worth of the Leader Telegram written, edited, and printed, so they wouldn’t have to work over the holidays; settling his mom in the living room; adjusting to Julie whistling Captain and Tennille in the mornings, showering through the hot water in the evenings; corralling and managing his dad’s epic Christmas celebration plans: returning the live goose, canceling the Victorian Chorale, extinguishing several practice figgy pudding flame outs.

  “Is it over?” Frank said.

  Martin decided to skip a few lines.

  Where the antelope is grazin’ and the lonely plovers call

  It was there that I attended the Cowboys’ Christmas Ball.


  “You missed the mockingbirds singin’ and the monstrous stars winkin’,” said Dottie as she revved her mattress into its most upright position. Julie reached over the gasping woman, punched the button on the morphine pump, and eased her back into her pillows. “I’ll read you the whole thing later,” she said.

  “And the double mountains slumbering in heavenly kinds of dreams.” Martin watched the tension melt off Dottie like high sierra snow in the spring. She took Julie’s hand and muttered, “Antelope grazin’…lonely plover…call.”

  Dottie was still dying as much as she had been two weeks earlier, when they moved her to the hospital bed. You could smell it on her, see it in her. But she seemed so much better now, listening to the poetry as Martin read. He continued to the end, not lifting his head until the last stanza, then gazed a moment at the tilting star atop the Christmas tree and shut the little book softly. Dottie, revived, sat up, hands clasped in front of her chest, cheeks flushed.

  “Oh, Martin,” she said, eyes sharp and clear, for a rare moment, of the haze of drugs and death. “That was just wonderful.” She leaned toward him, clapped twice, then fell back. “I’m a little dizzy.”

  Lattner and Mrs. Trinkle picked up the applause. “Bravo!” Lattner called and Mrs. Trinkle added, “Well done.”

  “Done?” said Frank, propping his head up on one hand. Three verses into the recitation, he had collapsed face down into a pile of balled-up gold tinfoil, knotted curly ribbons, and gift tags bearing sled-riding snowmen. “Really and truly and finally done?”

  “Will you read ‘Chopo’ now, Martin? I think we all want to hear it,” said Dottie, shutting her eyes. “It reminds me of when I was a girl.”

  “A little of this first,” said Julie, punching at the morphine pump’s button again. “That was great, Martin.” She gave a couple of claps, her long nails, painted red and green, flicked festively.