Call It Horses

by Jessie van Eerden

  On the concrete porch I toed the XYZ encyclopedia at the bottom of the stack, leaned into one of the three cedar posts holding up the porch roof. I twisted my thick black hair into a tail, careful with the cigarette. I’d canned beets that morning, from the Route 9 Market, just to smell them, though it was not their season, my seeds barely in the ground. These were Mexican beets. The smell of beets canning is hot, a bitter-dirt smell you taste—you might not know that smell, as you surely do not know my chemical janitorial odor, my clapboard house, my circumscribed Caudell life so opposite your New England life as I’ve always imagined it, infused with a vast foreign air.

  I’ll describe this place for you since you never came here, this place that grew your Mave, like a tuber. Two stoplights, a Shop ’n Save and Dairy Delite and Citgo and a primary school that was once the high school—now kids are bussed to Monroeville for the county’s consolidated high school. A motel and feed store on the end of town near the Route 9 Market where, besides beets, you can get bagged corn nuts and boxes of Skoal in bulk. There’s a bank, a community center, there’s the complex of steel and concrete and loading docks that makes up LaFaber Bronze, where most people still work. The churches are scattered satellites, also the homes, hunkered between small fields of alfalfa or timothy or weeds and outlined in a black mold from the swamp that edges Caudell and destabilizes the soil for building out any farther. Then the woods, the limestone caves—one as tall as a train—the creek Heather Run, its banks lined with small sycamores and laurel. The places I could walk blind.

  My hands still glowed faintly beet pink in the porch light, darker at the cuticles. My question about Clay’s proposal was really: How rabid was I for life? And what had love to do with that? And would I become a gray bird of a thing like Lottie in that kitchen with muslin curtains, or would I dance in some private ceremony to a record player and cocoon myself in a tapestry to be unwound and unwound? The front of my body, in denim shirt and work jeans, felt open and closed at once, all my inner folds restless.

  “The sex will taste like Dimetapp,” I said.

  “God, Frankie. Do it or don’t. It’s inconsequential.” Gruff, her gray head electric, in that shirt and sweater. As if she’d walked out of a psych ward.

  Aunt Miranda had said a few hours earlier what no one else would say: that Stew, who ran a body shop at his house and played in Clay’s band and who, she could see, drew me magnetically, already had a wife. And that Dillon—my first love, my only love, from my youth—was not coming back. At that, I’d recoiled my not-young head and looked away from Miranda’s stooped body. I’d left her a pint of beets without another word.

  Now, I admitted it to myself, speaking toward the alfalfa grass that bordered Mave’s lot on the other side, a wide field of it. “Dillon’s been gone years.”

  Next to the defunct churn, a mud dauber stirred heavily around its pan-flute nest of mud long molded by the female mouths. “Go to sleep, you lazy bastard,” Mave said to it.

  Stew and I had always been nothing—simply a flash of heat—and Dillon a blur across ten years, though I could conjure the water’s edge, of course. Always. Lilies and saplings of spruce, the wetlands people fear for their blurred boundary, the shallow waters lapping, and skin everywhere. The tall Train Cave and the small fire we built and our fiercely moving then slowing shadows. And our silence, our deeper chests keeping distance.

  “I’m serious,” Mave said, “everything’s blue. Put that in your book.”

  “There is no book.”

  “PBS aired a special on your Holy Mary, on weeping Mary statues across the world. Our Lady of Lima, Our Lady of Sicily and Syracuse, of the Sacred Heart in Platina, Brazil. They said when her statue cried tears of honey or drops of oil she could heal people. But if the pope says hoax, it’s hoax. Catholics are mystifying. Like the pope was even there to see it—he doesn’t exactly live local to Brazil. I started dreaming about a blue Mary bawling her eyes out and me trying to catch her tears from across the world, in a kind of urn. Fucking wild. Her skin and hair and everything—blue like a Smurf.”

  I laughed a small laugh.

  She said, “I dreamed my shitbox car turned into a blue Mercedes.”

  I stood to go.

  “You watch those bugs rising up out of the alfalfa. They love salt, they’ll feed on your sweat.”

  “I don’t know what to do,” I said.

  “I’m serious about that book.”

  “I didn’t even finish high school. I’m a goddamn janitor at the bronze plant.”

  “And I’ve got a master’s degree in linguistics and drive a school bus. So what? You’re bright. When you were little, you said, Mave, read my book, and you showed me that kitten diary that locked. Remember that? You’d copied out the entire Book of Revelation from Margot’s Bible, and I thought, My god, you’re misled but, you know, you’ll come into your own. She thought it too.”

  And there you were, Ruth—she referred to you, not my mother Margot. Oblique reference.

  “Do I marry Clay or not?”

  “And you pulled your red wagon across town and people said, What are you hauling in there? And you said, God’s body. As if that were obvious cargo, like a stuffed panda.”

  “You don’t believe in God.” I stood near her thickness and gray head. I bent down toward her, my hair outspread and inky. She had been my guardian, my teacher when I’d dropped out of school, my cumbersome fellowship. She had filled me full of the table scraps from her graduate studies after washing up back here, bereft.

  “It doesn’t matter if you get married. Men and women come. Their bodies list over to the left then topple. You know that.”

  “I still have to say yes or no.”

  “Write a damn book. Look for more, Frankie.” She waved her hand in a hocus-pocus motion over the yellowed encyclopedia stack as though to transform it into that more.

  A tip of a rabbit ear antenna snagged my shirt as I turned to go.

  She said, “I read this line from Rukeyser today, in her Collected.‘Do I move toward form? Do I use all my fears?’ That’s a good line. You have to use all of it, everything.”

  Some other sound flanked us, maybe the clucking of a whitetail, and then the shuffling of grass. It was night in earnest. I looked back at her profile, her face that had always radiated for me a godlessness and nerve, a sadness, a sickly humor, a mystification. And something close to love but not quite. She went skeletal on the side hidden from light, a little caved in, a face for the night bugs to feed on.

  I studied the three ruined TVs she had burned up trying to stay alive. I thought, yes, wash up, throw on jeans, can your beets, and write your book. These are my instructions. Become part of the world and move out into it.

  These were our ragged selves in that almost-summer, Ruth. Buzzed and on edge, pressed between a First and a Last.

  “You going to be okay tonight?” I asked her.

  “Sure,” she said. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

  I PULLED NAN’S OLDSMOBILE INTO THE EXXON LOT, as if steering a sailboat. This was the last turnoff before the on-ramp to 79 southbound. Almost noon and I would go grim after noon, lose the morning’s sharp edges. I thought maybe I’d lose my nerve. The plan had been to leave before dawn so we could watch the sky pink up, but there’d been the vehicle complication, then the Nan complication. Nan who, in my rearview mirror, was now trying to French twist her hair with only a few bobby pins.

  “Even I know that can’t work,” said Mave, turned around to watch.

  “I can’t go in there looking like this,” said Nan.

  “Piss on the seat then. It’s your leather.” Mave opened the car door and collected the portable oxygen tank, like a sack lunch. She’d grown used to it, and I didn’t like that. “You’re in self-serve,” she told me. “I’ll give them a twenty inside.” She hoisted her dense-barrel torso up and out of the car. I saw her take one breath through blades and halt.

  “Just hang on, and I’ll help you,” I said.

&nbs
p; She slammed the ton-heavy door.

  Nan rolled down the back window. “Will you get me some pork rinds?”

  “No, I will not.” Mave didn’t turn. “We’re bound for the desert, little hussy. Prepare to eat your wild honey and locusts.”

  “What?”

  “Don’t touch my pain pills.”

  Nan unfettered her hair and sulked. Left alone with her, I needed to do something with my hands, pump the gas, check the oil. I double-checked for a paper bag stowed in the glove box in case my nerves hit and I hyperventilated, but then I remembered this was not my pickup. Breath constricted just slightly in my asthmatic chest and I was out the door.

  Seeking the fuel tank, I took in the heft of the car, probably a decade old. Pale blue, a rim of rust, boxy windows, long nose. An Oldsmobile Royale, the once-bright silver Royale stamped near the tank. I lifted the nozzle, selected the grade. I was all narrowness—I was often thus. I willed myself to look upon the waify woman in the backseat as though she were a benign fern. My eyes scanned, scanned, then followed the price ticking upward, steadily, and my chest widened back out. I could picture an entity inside me, elbowing for room. I begged like Saint Augustine—Come, God, insinuate your spaciousness into my narrow channel. Make me all lake and expansive alfalfa field. Make me all desert sky.

  Nan abandoned her hair project and slunk off to the service station. I didn’t watch her walk more than a few feline steps in her black ballet shoes. Men whistled, men blew. Fine, I was at sixteen forty-nine, sixteen fifty.

  I skipped the oil and took Ellis out on the leash toward the grassy patch beyond the air compressor. He looked bewildered. I scratched among his neck folds and stroked his ears. “Hey, Flop, hey,” I said. I held a pack of Shop ’n Save mini donuts and gave him one. His thick black and tan body gave itself to me and leaned into my leg, then he moved on and peed. My husband would not miss me, but he would miss this sack of hound. The payphone was right there. It was his dog.

  I called my friend Clarissa instead. The only one who knew where we were.

  She’d waved goodbye that morning from the wide porch of her house, having given us a Tupperware of bologna sandwiches and saltines with peanut butter. In her flannel robe, her light hair messily frothed about her face, she’d tied a sheer scarf around my neck, a gift from her daughter Tess. I’d loved the feel of the scarf, though I’d removed it and stuck it in the back pocket of my jeans. I touched it now. The phone rang.

  “Hey,” she said. “You okay? Are you in a ditch somewhere?”

  “Remind me why we’re doing this.”

  “I have no idea why you’re doing this. I just packed you a lunch.”

  The phone line buzzed, a tractor trailer stuttered. I saw one of my fellow fugitives emerge from the Exxon, the one with an external lung.

  “Hey?” says Clarissa. “You know why you’re doing this. You know it’s for Mave.” Her kicked heart still opened and stayed fleshy—how? If I could love, I’d love like Clarissa, my friend since childhood.

  “What if I commit murder?”

  “Don’t commit murder. Nan’s harmless. How’s Mave?”

  Clarissa had a few souls to spare. She who bruised more easily than a ripe peach, who worked hard to stay upright in this world. I told her she’d forgotten the mustard.

  When the time came, Mave had gone in for one round of chemo only. Her mouth parched, she puked herself dry. With that cobwebbed throat, you’d think she’d have wanted the seepage and the marsh of home, but she wanted dry mesa air, she wanted all the humidity and haze drained away. “I just want clarity,” she said. “The bog’s big voice is drowning me out. I want sagebrush and piñon pine and the white snow of cottonwoods along the scarce river. I have never seen the desert.”

  I said okay. I knew she wanted your Egypt. Your Persia. Your hieroglyphic scrawl baked by the sun. I said I would drive her west, down off the ridge of the Caudell swamp and wetlands.

  “Then I want Memphis on the way,” she said. Neither of us had been west of the Mississippi.

  I’d prayed, May the skunk cabbage stink of her life dissipate. “Get me out of the bog, Frankie,” she’d said, “and far from the damp limestone caves. I just have to get out of here.” She’d shivered, her face white from the poison in her body, the metal splinters in her lungs.

  When we loaded back into the Olds, Ellis licked Nan’s face and investigated her pork rinds.

  “Hit the road,” Mave said. “Why are we still sitting here?”

  Only for a second did I think I’d turn back and forget everything. Get her to a hospital, get my husband’s supper on the table. I started the car. “I’m worthless now,” I told her. “It’s past noon, we’re in the dead hours, all bankrupt.”

  “Don’t worry.” Mave rode the wind with her right arm. “If we hit tolls, we’ll offer Little Gypsy Moth Hair as barter. Pay with her. That all right with you, Nan?”

  “Fuck off.” Big territorial crumple of pork rind bag.

  You wrote me once: This is how to let the world in—say Croatia. Argentina. Abiquiú. Put fingertips on the globe of green and beige and deep blue and on all the scattered names. Say the names until you go there and learn what names they were before that, names pulled from the first dirt. When you’re there, weep with all the people, laugh with them. Tell them everything. Love them.

  I’ve been nowhere all my life, Ruth, except in that house across the break in the fence from hers. She and I have not wept. You wrote me once that Mavis, her full name, means song thrush, Celts pulling words from the world. From the dirt and sky. The drawing of acacia tree means sweet, you wrote. There’s a bird that means soul. Let the world in, you told me—all the names across time are real, each with a heartbeat.

  But sometimes I could not find the heartbeat.

  CLAY ASKED FOR MY ANSWER BY SUNDAY, a Sunday back in that early spring of 1989 when Mave’s drinking would get worse then better then worse again. The Good News Boys would play a set at the Chapel at Snyder’s Crossing. Baptists liked announcements and liked Clay, his every contour meek. To me, they would object. Snyder’s Crossing was Uncle Rex and Aunt Miranda’s church, and it had been my mother and dad’s and mine until I was orphaned at sixteen and quit the pew when Mave had given me the choice. Miranda, with my four cousins bunched behind her, had studied my bloodless face, put a hand to my head for fever. “What’s wrong with you?” she’d said, always asking underneath, what are you, what manner of thing? The oldest of the four, my age, my pretty cousin Belinda, had slipped over and taken my hand, until Miranda had herded them off. Belinda and I had once found a baby bat snagged in a window screen in daylight, its whole body in a terrified squint, native to darkness. I’d wanted to tell her that’s how I felt in the oak pew.

  Friday night I’d left Mave’s house for mine knowing I would refuse Clay. I’d ringed my jars of glowing beets, lined them up on the rough-lumber table, and slept. Saturday he invited me over to his mother’s for a pancake breakfast.

  I brought a pint of beets for Lottie. He set them on the cold woodstove. He’d made a big production of it. Cool Whip set out, too much bacon in the skillet, syrup that wasn’t simply brown sugar and boiled water with imitation vanilla. He stood steadied by the good fortune of the morning, like any forty-nine-year-old man who still lived with his mother and who had never had to miss certain things—the small scent of lemon dish detergent, the assuring rustle in the other room, mended jeans. And now maybe a wife. But in me, there was bone and edge that offered no refuge—did he not know this?

  You wrote me once, Ruth, that people could layer like the earth, a permafrost tundra on top and a magma heart. You wrote: That hot blood around your heart, all you feel, eventually you’ll share it, it will come to surface. A thaw, or an eruption.

  Clay still had all his hair. The West Virginia Division of Highways had not been bad for his back, there was muscle, but he hid a small paunch with untucked shirts. A body established, maybe, but still lean for the most part. He was a different pale
than I was, pasty with a boyish face and full mouth and a scar on his chin. He’d told me his favorite season was winter, when he plowed the secondary roads before dawn. I liked that. He was careful to keep his wrist-watch safe, washing dishes as he cooked, the whisk and mixing bowl and spoons.

  “Your pancakes are professional,” I told him. “Silver dollars.”

  He smiled. I was glad he said nothing. His good singing voice came out nasal when he spoke, bland boiled chicken. I sat on the kitchen chair, one of the set of four that someone had painted blue to match the bonnets of the girl reiterated in measured succession on the wallpaper trim. I asked if his mother Lottie would join us and should I set a plate, but he said she wanted to give us privacy. He shifted his weight then, facing the stove with his spatula, jeans taut against his other butt cheek just beneath his shirt tail.

  Lottie came into the kitchen anyway, in slippers that suggested lightness and fleeing, already planning her retreat to the woods behind the house, to the trailer that would be new and cheap. I knew Clay had reserved the cheapest on the B&J Homes lot in Monroeville. Did Lottie see in me what Clay didn’t? She habitually held the tip of her long braid when she spoke, when it was uncoiled from a bun and hung mid-belly, trailing over her shoulder. I wanted very much to see her hair completely unfurled.

  Lottie handed me a recipe card for wilted lettuce made with bacon grease, as Clay brought the skillet to the table and scooped out bacon with a slotted spoon, leaving the drippings. He set the shriveled meat on paper towels doubled up on a plate. To the hot drippings, add vinegar, sugar, salt, onions, and pour it hot over a bowlful of leaf lettuce. The handwriting on the recipe card was shaky. There was a tiny rolling pin in each corner of the card. He would set aside the skillet for her, or for me.