Call It Horses

by Jessie van Eerden

  It took years of shadows moving, growing dense. In my twenties something changed abruptly. Like a skin sack of wine breaking. Mother and Dad were nearly nine years dead by then, and I had also read most of your books by then, Ruth, in my house by Mave’s house, she and I installed in our specific patterns of solitude. Dillon and I had both quit the Baptists, he first. He let his grandmother whom he lived with sit the pew alone. He did not tell me why. And we’d both quit school and worked at the plant. Dillon was still a boy at twenty-three and I still boyish at twenty-five.

  We walked one day without talking and stood still at the fence at the far end of Uncle Rex’s Guernsey pasture. I was after wild lilies to uproot and replant. I had a trowel in one hand and pulled up a loosened horde of orange lilies with the other. When I stood, I found him pressed up behind me, still silent, as was I. My jeans gapped enough in front to sag loose, I made my stomach concave, and he palmed me there then slid slowly down, crossed my chest with his other arm like a brace. I dropped the tool but not the lilies. Without noise, without meeting eyes, we threaded expertly through the barbed wire fence and headed to where Heather Run pooled into a brief pond, then walked still further. We went quickly on to the hidden source of the creek, the underground spring giving way to swamp. We stopped in a standing wrestle and crush of lilies, kissed roughly and with such latent hunger against a broad tree, fumbled then through the woods homing to the small mouth of the Train Cave. Did we not seek the swallow of it? We ducked in and felt though could not see its great inner expanse until, somewhere, it narrowed to nests and low tunnels deeper in. He wore his Army jacket, I felt him take it off and lay it on the stone and tamped dirt. There were bats, I felt their brush with my bare back, then his jacket lining against my bare back, the uneven ground beneath. In the smell of white-dark limestone and the wet of petrified drip-down stalactites, his familiar mouth took me in and uttered me. His hips and belly and all of him taut, he arched, and then a blur at our boundaries’ edges, he and I wrung into the same person with four arms and four legs. We lay heaving.

  And afterward, there was an awful quiet. My mirror self—a boy in that old surplus-store jacket and in undershirts that I wore that he wore, and temples that throbbed thoughts to me—afterward, wet, were we not as close as two people ever get? Yet I put my hot hand on his chest, and the breastbone that rose and fell fast was his. It was his alone. My second self obscured. This was when we split apart.

  IT WAS LATE ON THE S ATURDAY OF THE PANCAKES and Liza’s letter when I called Mave. She was bitter about the hour and groggy. Said she’d dreamed of blue horses. Said, “The nicotine patch isn’t working, but it keeps things interesting.” She knew Clay had staged the betrothal breakfast date but didn’t ask about it. I told her about Liza. She was sorry to hear it and did remember her as the girl who came with her mother to bring weekly casseroles after my parents’ death.

  “The Tupperware was all labeled,” she said. “Even the lids.”

  “That’s her.” I stood in my kitchen winding the stretched-out phone cord around my hand. The phone line ticked as if the connection were long distance and not across the fence.

  “I was going to tell you in the morning,” I said. “Are you sober?”

  “That’s a matter of opinion.”

  “Will you give me away?”

  A pause. “You should have seen those horses run. There was a blue palomino, I think.”

  “At the wedding, Mave.”

  Ticking of the line. I heard the night sounds outside her window that were my night sounds. The summer peepers and insect trills that spill into your skull and make your mind’s action subside, let all language and thought froth down and down.

  “I NEED SOME NEW CLOTHES,” SAID NAN AT THE SIGNS FOR SUTTON.

  “You hear me, Frankie?”

  I had not yet mustered the strength to address the scamp directly. I studied the skin divots under her collar bone in my mirror, the faint lip liner applied in her other life. A black bra strap peeked from her dress. She was ten years younger than I. Even with the black eye and that crazy hair, she was indisputably beautiful.

  “I only had time to pack a couple things.” Peevish, delicate face. I wondered what it was she was after.

  Scraggly vetch purpled the highway median, and I knew my cold shoulder toward Nan was cruel and undeserved. Also, I could sense, working up in Mave then, a swarm of inner black flies—what she called the wheezing and coughing that overtook her in those days, fits at their own appointed time. “The flies bite on the inside,” she’d say.

  “We can stop there,” said Mave, pointing to the billboard for Antiques & Primitives. “All you’ll need is a loin cloth and sea shells. Frankie, note that attire in the book.”

  “Listen,” Nan said, “this is my car and we have a long way to go, so maybe you can speak civil.”

  “I mean no harm, Gypsy Moth,” whispered Mave with scanter air.

  “Are you going to talk to me, Frankie, or just let the crazy answer?” Nan leaned forward to poke her head above the console, its cup holder full of Mave’s red candy from the Exxon. “All the way to Arizona, you’re not going to speak to me.”

  “Abiquiuú’s in New Mexico,” said Mave.

  “Wherever. It’s my car.”

  “It’s your bully husband’s car,” said Mave. “It’s our joyride, and you were not exactly invited.”

  Nan muttered something. Flung herself back, and I heard Ellis the hound take offense. “Why Ab-ee-cue anyway?”

  We hadn’t even made it out of West Virginia. There were at least thirty road hours ahead. Mave’s Pontiac had blown months before, my pickup had gone dead that morning. We’d packed the truck, intending to swing by Clarissa’s to say goodbye and give her the tub of squash from Miranda. I’d turned the key in the faithful black Ford Ranger I’d bought off Rex—nothing.

  Then, unbelievably, out of nowhere came Nan in Dillon’s blue Oldsmobile, and why? I didn’t know. Maybe because I ran the women’s co-op, and she’d turned up there at our most recent gathering, early that September of 1990, looking like she held something bloody. I remembered that first encounter with her so vividly—she’d appeared at my kitchen door with that wild hair and a hand at her front, looking hugely pregnant. The other women congregated in the living room, and I met her at the door.

  “Is this the get-together?” she said through the screen and opened the door boldly, forced it past where it caught on the porch floor, and stepped inside into full exposure. She was starkly pretty, though thin in the face with heavy lipstick and eye shadow, younger than I by several years, that great mound of hair, not pregnant after all but her front bulged. I saw a dark bruise at the front of her neck. She wore a green Army jacket too large for her. She held her house dress folded up in front of her, gathered at the hem to make a kind of sack, the dress a light pastel yellow. A black slip showed in front, satiny to her knees, and lovely legs below ending in black ballet shoes. Through the dress-sack, bright red streaks bled. Because of where and how she held her bulk, I was afraid she held a dead baby. I stared. She hefted, struggled toward the slab table in the kitchen. “My god,” I said.

  “Thought maybe I could join you all?” She made it to the table and released her load. Large topped and scrubbed beets rolled onto the surface, a dozen or more. Some fell to the floor and she laughed. “I have these to trade. You trade things at a co-op, right?” A curvy sliver of a woman with a bloodied yellow dress. “I’m Nan,” she said. No care for ruining the fabric with stain.

  Army jacket, loose-legged, and that hair. I had known, though she’d not said, that she was Dillon’s wife.

  “Looks like you got beer?” she’d said, hopeful.

  But maybe, that October morning of the stalled-out truck and foiled plans, she’d driven to my house because she was hated by every woman in town since she flirted with their husbands, since she strode around in short dresses, since she’d been caught with the football coach in the high school locker room. But Dillon had beat
en her before the coach fiasco; I’d seen her bruises. She found us sitting there defeated—Mave strung with tubing and me with an ice floe caught in my ribcage.

  “Help me, my god, he will kill me,” Nan said.

  Because she was starved for something unnamed. Or, most simply, she’d driven to my house because she had nowhere else to go, and she was on this trip because she had a running vehicle.

  “Tell her I’m driving,” I’d said to Mave, and we’d piled in.

  “Georgia O’Keeffe lived in Abiquiú,” Mave said. “The painter. She wasn’t from there. Sometimes you recognize yourself in a place you’ve never seen before. O’Keeffe said that.”

  I watched Nan watch the window glass and maybe all else blowing by, the exit for antiques and primitives, the skinny trees. Her eye ringed in bruise seemed to shine at the mention of O’Keeffe. I had seen Nan’s drawings, the dirty ones but also the artful ones she showed no one.

  Mave went pensive and deserted and professorial, as she often did, and said, “O’Keeffe woke early and immediately started painting. She went at it all day, ate a few things, little mealy squirrels on sticks, a few locusts, some honey. She slept in an old car so she could listen to the red rocks at night. She worked first thing in the morning because once you wait, the moment is gone. After dawn, half the day has passed you by, Little Gypsy Moth Head. You have to beat the morning glories that never seem real.” Mave took a breath, two, three. “I think she worked sometimes without a shirt. Just brown my body and leave me in peace with ochre and blue.”

  Then Mave was no longer speaking. She drilled her head into her head rest, gripped her thighs, her body one long fist. She gasped and coughed hard, a full-on fit.

  “It’ll pass, it’ll pass,” I said, signaling to pull over.

  She wheezed and hacked, and thick yellow spit—not black flies—flecked the dash.

  I pulled off to the shoulder, skidded in the gravel, there was a tumble of hound. “Hey.” I was in her face, but she clenched her eyes. “Are you taking what you’re supposed to? Where’s your sack?”

  She got a single good breath down, calmed, coughed once more.

  “I said where’s your sack?”

  “Give me a codeine,” she said.

  “Did you take the fluid pill? And the steroid?”

  “I flushed everything but the codeine.”

  “Dammit,” I said. I got out, circled to her side, and dug frantically in her brown bag in the door’s lower cup holder for the pain pills. She took them with Pepsi, leaned back on the headrest, stricken head all skull, as if flesh could sometimes be an illusion. There was no way they could work that fast but she gave in at the swallow, unfisted down into the seat. I realized Nan stood beside me on the shoulder only when I felt the bird take my wrist. Her wild hair took a hit from a semi slamming past. I said nothing.

  Ruth, it was clear that Mave’s time was running out. And clear we were running. From what specter, I did not know then. I knew only that our lives lived in the damp black of the bog and within the tiresome outlines of ridge and alfalfa had always felt like lives haunted. And maybe Nan, too, had felt haunted as she’d sought out lovers, dodged my once-sweet Dillion’s fist, and painted things with her homemade paints and her aerosol.

  Mave’s cells rearranged, and the pain and constriction ebbed. She was asleep before I pulled back onto the highway.

  I WROTE YOU WHEN I WAS A CHILD, RUTH, BECAUSE YOU HEARD MY MIND. Since I never heard your actual speaking voice, I imagined you talking inside my head with the scratchy sound of a sad record, then I’d sit down to pad and paper thinking thoughts I would not have otherwise thought.

  Once, as a kid, I used Clarissa’s nail polish brush to draw my own invented hieroglyph on a clay jar. What does it say? I asked Mave—this was around the time she had come home for good. She studied it. A false star, she said. A false promise of dawn. No, a shirt on a clothesline. Or a wolf in blurred motion—see its long snout and running legs? She set it on her sill. She’d cropped off her hair. I brought the ceramic figurines from the box of Red Rose tea bags—a monkey and a sheep—and put them, and other things, in the jar for her because I understood she was lonely. At that time, I began to write you only in my head and I thought about the heartbeat of the named world, which you’d written to me about, but I no longer had your letters to reread.

  ON SUNDAY EVENING, AFTER CLAY HAD ANNOUNCED our engagement at Snyder’s Crossing, I returned to Lottie’s kitchen. Shoes off, I felt Ellis’s warm place on the rug by the woodstove. He’d lain there until he’d reoriented to the pool of sun by the smoky box of parsley. His stomach was a mound. He dreamed a vivid brutish dream and sounded fluffs of bark, and I bent to touch him.

  Clay had cut three yellow dahlias from somewhere and stuck them in a wide-mouthed jar which gave them great leeway. As I’d walked up the driveway, I’d noted the red, white, and blue pinwheels stuck in the yard, snug to the yew bush, but it was May so they must have been left over from the last July Fourth. I could sense the inertia. They did not wheel around in the breezeless air. I knew he’d announced our engagement as he strummed the guitar and sang praise through the small amp with the backing of the gospel band, including lean and impenetrable Stew on bass, thinking who knows what about the news. My phone had rung all afternoon, but I had not picked up. It would be Miranda and the cousins—Belinda, Tuffie.

  He wore a Sunday dress shirt and seemed nervous that I’d change my mind. He sat.

  “I have some conditions,” I said, and he said okay, what are they.

  “I want to marry you on an old garden plot at Rex and Miranda’s.”

  Relief puffed his lips. “Okay.”

  “They used to grow potatoes there, but it’s grass now, and flat and pretty for an outdoor wedding. And I don’t want to wear a white dress.”

  “Whatever you want.”

  “And I want to keep my house in my name.”

  The hound rotated his moon-mound belly, flapped an ear, and Clay shifted his attention there. How much warmth did he truly have for me? I saw the blush of throat before I heard the agitation in his voice. Uncustomary, didn’t I think? I suspected he’d planned to sell my house to pay for his mother’s trailer. I told him I’d need a place for the co-op women to meet, and he searched me, carefully, as he often did, as if to mine my cold mind. It had all been riddled with kindness and courtesy, from the first time he’d taken me to the Dairy Delite.

  “Couldn’t the women meet here?”

  “You’ll have band practice here.”

  “Just on Saturday nights.”

  “The women can get rowdy. There’s a good bit of drinking you won’t like. And I’d rather you and I have privacy.” I stood backed up against the stove, and I knew I should sit with him, put my hands on the table where he could see them as empty and open and harmless. “I will live here with you, Clay, but I want to keep my house.”

  Inside my skull I pictured myself his wife. The parsley-smoked air that existed between us, two people in one room, seemed vast and obscuring. I sensed he and I would not cross certain membranes and boundary lines. Clay said okay. He stood and bent to scratch Ellis’s ears with rough tenderness and the dog splayed beneath it. I slipped my shoes back on. It was a kiss goodbye he wanted. I went to him, kissed him on the cheek where the throat’s flush had faintly spread.

  “And I want Aunt Mave to give me away.”

  “Should be your Uncle Rex, since your father’s passed.”

  “Maybe so.”

  He gave me the jar of dahlias. I couldn’t tell whether I excited him or not, whether he might excite me. Against the house’s soft rustling colors, the eggshell white of the kitchen walls lined with the redundant bonneted girl, I felt like a harsh discordant color. The screen door would shut several beats after I walked through it, with the slow measured closure of a hydraulic.

  I DID NOT DRIVE HOME. I drove the two miles past my turnoff to Rex and Miranda’s truck patch that sat far enough from their farmhouse for me to keep
out of their sight. On the west side of the half-acre garden already vining with peas and rimmed in a perimeter of unblooming zinnias lay the old garden plot. Now fallow, this was the plot where I’d dug potatoes with my cousins—the twin boys, Ron and Benji, and Belinda and Tuffie—when Aunt Miranda still complained of a mild chronic pleurisy. Every time she lifted a child, pain—something torn loose from her lung, she said. And even when her kids were ten, twelve, fifteen, she maintained that spinal curve, as if sheltering herself. The old milkhouse, rendered obsolete long ago by the refrigerator, hunkered on the far side of the plot in a dip in the land. The stream that branched off Heather Run flowed through low slits in the walls and over the building’s concrete foundation to keep things cool. A defunct structure impractical even before the dawn of the Frigidaire because it sat too far from the house. Rex had always used it for tools.

  It was not lost on me that Miranda had had four kids at my age, hefting them and feeling each heft in the lung. I straightened my shoulders and walked the length of the cultivated patch toward the fallow one. A dead crow Rex had shot hung on a pole to warn the survivors away from the planted seed corn. Carnage for crows and electric fencing for deer, no strung-together foil pie pans around the border like I used to deter them. He called the pans superstitious. I squatted down at the corner where the worked-up garden met the resting plot, its scars grown over with crabgrass.

  As children, we had halved the seed potatoes with paring knives, planted them in straight-enough rows. We took hoes to hill up the vines and shield the crop from sun poisoning, then we let the vines shrivel into early fall, dug the new potatoes in October. We followed behind Rex’s tractor to stuff the cool Kennebecs in our sacks. I remember once, as I stood with my sack opposite Ron—the feebler of the twins, with rail-thin arms and dreamy, distracted eyes—we watched the tractor’s plow force the tubers to the sun along with little balls of mice babies Rex did not mean to kill.