I Was Trying to Describe What it Feels Like

by Noy Holland

  WAS HER COLOR like that inside her?

  She had not seen where her mother opened.

  The sound of the mare, she could make with her tongue, a wet, almost popping sound of pucker and slack, spittle the stallion had tasted. The mare had pushed against the paddock fence and the daughter had leaned back into the fence, helping, holding the mare, saying with the mother, “Whoa, Blue,” pushing the fence back into her mother saying, “That’s a girl, now, easy.”

  It was the skin of the mare that had blued in the rain; her mane and her tail had not. Her tail had lifted over her back and the daughter had seen her winking, the pink clot of flesh as bright as the turned-up lid of an eye. Her father reached under the stallion, helping, guiding him, walking on two legs.

  Was that her own smell, a smell not the smell of the mountain color or snakes that swam in the field? Was that the smell of her mother?

  “LET ME REST a minute,” the daughter said.

  She could not see the water, but the slow shape of her mother raised up and the water was louder then. She said, more loudly now, “I get so worn down.”

  “Melissa,” the mother said.

  “I do,” said the daughter.

  The gate trilled against its brace, opened but for the bottom edge the water curved past swiftly. The mother leaned into the rush of the water.

  “Pumpkin,” the mother said, “what about the horsies? If they cut off the water before we’re finished, what will the horsies do?”

  “I don’t want to,” the daughter said, “I get so worn down.”

  She was watching her legs, pulled along, hop and bob in the water.

  “I hurt my hands,” she said. “See?”

  When she let go the weeds on the bank of the ditch to hold out her hands to show her mother, the water pulled her down into the ditch to the waistband of her jeans. She giggled. They leaned together into the current.

  THE DITCH CUT the width of the field and past that was the boulevard and then came mountains. The water ran back to the mountains. Snow fell on the mountains and ran in the spring to the river and the river ran into the sea. In spring, the snow got smaller. Some days you could not notice it, but that did not make it not so.

  Unso, the daughter thought. Some of it stayed on the mountains—patches of white the daughter watched—to speckles, a shine in the eye—then nothing but the blank of stone. It would not happen if you watched it. One morning you would wake and see and it would be unso.

  SHE WENT OUT along the ditch ahead of her mother, walking with the water. The water pressed her jeans against her faster than she wanted to go.

  Weeds that had come from the riverbed, pulled free in the flash of rain, caught on the mother’s legs as she walked; the weeds that grew in the silted ditch broke loose and floated—mustard, the mother knew, and ragweed, goat head and loco. Her coat sleeves pulled long. The mother dipped her arms in the water, netting weeds with her hands. The skin of her hands looked blue to her. She had found them, waking, beside her, on the sheets in bed.

  “Come on,” the daughter said. “We’ve got to get these things open.”

  There were half a dozen smaller gates to let water throughout the field. The mouths of the gates were narrow. In the weeds the horses would not eat were the webs the yellow spiders built. The daughter could not see them, but she beat them down with her hand.

  WATER HAD BROKEN inside the mare. It was different water—not like water for the field. The field water broke on stones as it came down the mountains. You could not hear a mare’s water breaking.

  They had brought the mare to foal in a clean stall in the earth-walled barn—at night and in the rain also, for the rain, it seemed to the daughter, weakened the mare’s skin.

  She had said, “You can see right into her.”

  The mare’s milk veins had swelled blue in the rain or not, thick as a rope used to hobble. The daughter had slept out in the feed room, so close she could hear the mare eating—sweet feed and warm bran mash, select flakes of alfalfa. It would only take keeping near the mare to know no harm would come.

  Yet it had not surprised the daughter—that you could drown as the foal had drowned inside your own mother.

  Hand and elbow, up to where the muscle hooked into his shoulder bone, the father had reached up into the mare to yank the foal out of the mare pinned against the paddock fence the daughter pushed back into.

  She was the daughter.

  The places there were to go were the sounds of their names in her hand.

  OHIO.

  Armathwaite.

  Wetumka.

  Canarsie.

  THE WOMEN ARE still walking.

  We expect when they reach the gate at the border of the field, something more will have happened. Something more should have been said.

  ARMATHWAITE.

  Lady Jane—a gray name.

  Canarsie.

  BLUE ONE WAS the name of her and—where the dead mare winched by her pasterns lay—a grassless place the horses, for whatever reason, stood. She was the sound their hooves made striking the dry field. She was the dry field.

  “Uh-oh,” the mother said.

  They walked stoppingly, held against the push of the water. Behind them was the spoor of weeds they had netted with their hands.

  “Penny,” said the daughter.

  “Afraid.”

  The dark shapes of the horses lunged out in the thudding field.

  “Afraid?”

  “I don’t know,” the mother said.

  The daughter whinnied.

  SHE CANTERED TO school in the morning, practiced dressage in the courtyard.

  Horsie, horsie, horsie.

  WHEN THE HORSES ran, in their bellies you heard the break and slosh if you rode them. Her mother said that was not water. But it was a sound like water, a place to have tea parties in, a sound where toads at night froze into the gawk of swimming. You could wrench through water, pinch and suck and poke at it; it would never save in it the places you had been.

  THERE WILL BE no words, Sister—but shape notes to sing out over our dead, over muddied fields and boulevards, shopping malls and hospitals our mother left for coffins. Oh, what snare of scars we claim of our mothers’ bodies, what wounds we have stitched ourselves into. Blame us, we beg, forgive us, all thanks and grateful blessings due.

  We are coming, Mother.

  We will be there soon.

  She will know us by our voices, our wild manes, by our splitting hooves.

  JERICHO

  The room was hot and dark and the children were sitting eating with their hands. The air smelled of rice and diapers. The children sat in chairs made for children or kneeled on the dirt floor. The floor was freshly swept and the lines the broom left in the loosened dirt still showed.

  Rice fell from the children’s mouths as they ate. The old señora who cared for the children would sweep out the room when they had eaten again. She would put the collar on the blind boy again who had pulled it off and dropped it.

  He was always pulling his collar off and dropping it and he fought her when she cinched the collar back on but he swung his head loosely without it as though he had no bones in his neck. He had a skinny neck and the bones showed. His skin was the brown of an egg. If she let him swing his head, he would begin to dance and soon the dance became wild and fast and took up the whole room. The dance frightened the other children. So the señora would have to fight him.

  She was old and she did not like to fight but the younger women had jobs in the town and the mother who was the blind boy’s mother had gone off to Guayaquil. She was fifteen and nobody blamed her. The boy had been blinded inside the mother by the medicine that saved her life. Nobody blamed her. She would have a life now. She danced at night in the discotheques and had her eyebrows tattooed on.

  The señora sat in her chair made for children and watched rice fall from the children’s mouths. She was as big as a boy of ten. She wound a sa
sh about her braid to keep tidy.

  SHE HAD BEEN a girl once with her father in the city of Guayaquil. Her father bought sandals for her in Guayaquil with tiny beads and sequins, and when she returned to the town all the other girls were jealous of her for a time. The beads were the eyes of flowers, luminous and blue.

  Some things should be beautiful.

  The bowls the children ate from were beautiful. At the bottom of each bowl, the señora had painted a fruit that grew in their yards or on trees near the town—chirimoya and maracuyá, guava and tomate de árbol.

  She painted the face of the mother on the bottom of the bowl the blind boy ate his rice from. Of course he would never see it. Even if he waked and could see by some accident, he would not know it was the face of his mother who had gone to Guayaquil.

  “MAMI,” SAID THE boy, and held his bowl out to say that he was hungry.

  The señora kept very still in her chair and watched the other children watch her. If she moved, the boy would know where she was. He would stand on her feet and twist her skirt in his hands and say mami.

  The other children liked to play at being blind and swung their eyes up so the color didn’t show and bumped into things and stumbled. The blind boy only stumbled when he danced. His eyes were the creamy blue of the beads of the sandals the señora’s father had given her as a girl in Guayaquil.

  She held herself very still. She had one dulce in her pocket.

  The blind boy came at her, as she knew he would. She had his collar in her hands. The collar was foam and dirty. She caught him under the chin with it and when he went to his knees as he always did, she cinched it at the back of his neck.

  The boy clawed at the collar. He rocked from one foot to the other. The señora said something soothing and the boy made a sound that was not a word but a sound like a cat or a monkey. He pulled the collar off and his head swung free and he began his little dance with his bowl held out.

  “¿Que haces?” the señora asked him.

  There was no more food and he knew it. There was never more food after the first bowl and the children knew not to ask.

  The blind boy’s dance grew wilder. He slapped his arms against his sides. His head swiveled on his neck. He rocked from one foot to the other and spun until he stumbled. He fell against the girl who was the smallest girl and she struck him hard and cried.

  The blind boy went on dancing. He was always happy, dancing. He danced until he could hardly stand and when he stopped he wore his beautiful bowl like a hat and stood with his legs far apart so he could stand and the dark shapes swam in his eyes. The dark shapes were all in the world he could see and he only saw them when he was dizzy from dancing.

  The señora let him be. He would be happy for a time. She would not have to fight to put the collar on him and he would go in his collar to the corner where he slept and the señora would have her chance then to sweep the rice from the floor. She swept the rice out the door into the terrible sun where the children jumped rope and ran.

  HE SLEPT WITHOUT moving, her little ciego. He made his long sounds like a mule.

  She had one dulce in her pocket. She knew by the shape and smell of it what flavor it would be.

  When she had washed the bowls and stacked them and wiped down the chairs and swept out the rice, she took the dulce from her pocket and gave thanks for it. She gave thanks for the children and for the fruit in the trees and thanks for her good broom, too.

  She unwrapped the dulce and the blind boy waked. She said his name and he came to her.

  Jericho stroked the tops of her feet with his feet. He smelled the dulce in her mouth.

  He would be patient; he knew to be patient.

  He heard her tug the sweetness from it.

  Jericho found the señora’s face with his hands and drew her mouth to his mouth and waited.

  He mustn’t whimper, he knew. He mustn’t ever brag or move his feet to dance or tug at the señora’s clothes. Jericho mustn’t blame his mother.

  His mother was beautiful, they all said so. She had her eyebrows tattooed on.

  The señora pushed the dulce to the tip of her tongue and she let him with his teeth pull it onto his tongue. Only Jericho she let do it. Jericho was such a good boy is why.

  HUNGER IS THE FIRST EMOTION

  The girls braid their hair together—black blonde black; blonde black blonde—and drag the water trough into the pond. It is a farm pond clogged with frogs’ eggs, salamanders, slime. They clamber into the trough and row out. It is the pond one girl’s brother nearly drowned in, the pond the wheezing goat drinks from. It is summer. It is autumn. The cold is closing in. They will be eighty together, rocking on a porch in the sunshine, even the grandchildren grown and gone. For now they are girls on a pond. They sing to each other, their foreheads touching, their braids hanging slack between them. One girl sings of her wheezing goats, the other of a bird asleep on the wind dreaming of a country far away.

  FIRE FEATHER MENDICANT BROOM

  There was a stonemason who went by the name of Hawk who, until his mother died and left him her home, had scarcely owned a thing. His mother’s home was not a house but a trailer on the outskirts of a big eastern city Hawk detested and he lived there with her dresses and jars of cream, with her radio tuned to the station she liked, and her book still opened on her chest of drawers to the last of the pages she had read.

  Hawk would rather have slept and passed his days in a hippie van or a pickup truck but he owned neither and never had. He arrived to work holding his broken-down gloves and soon these sprawled among the stones at his feet—a nuisance, he thought, and frivolous, though every finger of each glove was eaten through and the thumbs were mostly gone. He liked the feel of the rock in his hands.

  Hawk’s work was slow and meticulous. From the rough gray schist of the region, he built a stone egg that stood on end amid milkweed and goldenrod and the glassy bent grasses of a meadow. The egg was his most beautiful and difficult work and he carried a picture of it in his money clip, the way people carry pictures of people—daughters, sweethearts, sons.

  Hawk had no children, no wife, no mother now, though the idea of his mother was everywhere in the trailer where she had lived.

  He brought his hand to his mouth to feel his breath come and go in the room where she had passed her last days. He was Hawk for the shape of his nose like his mother’s and the unnerving flicker of his eyes.

  HAWK. A NAME like a revelation.

  So he wandered, but a boy—setting out by morning, by nightfall looping home. Home was a house on a rubble footing then. Hawk a boy in his feral glory, a truant who had buried his shoes. He learned the trees of that place and birdsong and ashen tatters of skin; tooth mark, claw; the habits of bees; the smell of a thing afraid. Here a doe slept, here a fawn. Here the ledge tilted skyward, glittering schist, and beneath it a fieldstone wall ran slumping through meadows to keep cattle and sheep in an era when the woods were cleared. Here morels grew, here were berries. Ginseng, psilocybin. Sap pulsing in the trees.

  The place was enough for him and then it wasn’t and soon he was said to be elsewhere building a house of mud. He baked bricks on their sides in the reliable sun, brought the walls to his knees and walked away.

  He walked from Tucumcari to Reno, across the great divide. He walked from Reno to Winnemucca and there found a cobbler in a dusty shop who taught Hawk to cobble his ruined boots and sew his own clothes and carve wood. He made a pouch from the tissue of a buck he had killed and from the bone of an elk he made buttons.

  Stew of raccoon, of squirrel.

  Roadkill should he come upon it.

  When his boots went to shreds he left them standing in the road facing where he had been. And walked on. His feet grew flat from walking, and calloused and gray and wide. He walked from the Black Rock to San Francisco and from San Francisco to Truckee and on to the Hood, the Missouri, the Milk, great northern windblown plains. Crow country; Mandan Sioux. For years litt
le was known or left of him but the cairns of what rock he came upon as though he meant to be found.

  Hawk sent word from time to time to his mother to relate some next fascination—a beetle walking out of its luminous shell, out of the barbs of its legs. The orderly ways of elk herding up; moonset while the sun lifts, too.

  Once a picture arrived of a cave of ice Hawk had chinked some indecipherable thing into—how, she could not say. By wing, by rope and harness.

  No word, ever, of a woman. Her son said nothing of where he had been nor where he was going now. A rumor reached her of Patagonia, great palisades of muttering ice, Hawk traveling with only a rucksack in whatever way he could. Tierra del Fuego, land of fire, people of fire in scant guanaco hides they moved to shelter their sex from the wind. The wind incessant. The calamitous past recorded and calving into the sea.

  Here rabbits clipped the grasses and trees grew hunched and low, turned from the wind and twisted. Gray seas battered the shore-bound rock and, green in the face of the lifting wave, the ice swam, brief and lethal. Heavy, hissing, frothing tide—it spit out the ice and moved on.

  Green of his mother’s dishes; shattered glass of the gods. A place that was like a painting of a place.

  A gray mist, and Hawk’s hair turned, and when his skin appeared gray he walked north again—blasted, brilliant, vacant days, pampas and tidy vineyards and flamingoes in shimmering pools, uncountable iridescent flocks like something from a dream he dreams still.

  BY HIS HANDS he is known and recognized and by a picture of the egg he still carries. By his flickering eye.

  Hawk.

  But something leaves him now. He is like something dying in a cage.

  Traffic moves without pause beyond the window; headlights approach and swing away.

  If he had a place for her things—but he has nothing. He sits among them. A neighbor boy comes to hear tales of Hawk’s travels but soon the boy’s mother forbids him to so much as walk down the block. The days are lengthening. The tin of his mother’s trailer ticks like a clock in the sun.