Call It Horses

by Jessie van Eerden

  I smoothed the taffeta, my ordinary adolescent cravings swelled and sobered by Good Friday. I had this idea that everyone in the churchyard was opening up into larger selves as they flipped fish and poured punch by the big stump—as natural as breathing, this largeness—but I couldn’t find a way to meet them in it. Why not?

  In the middle of everything, my longing reared its head just like a spear of crocus, up through ice and snow, and I mashed it back down. To save it. Or to deny it.

  ONE SATURDAY NIGHT, STEW DIDN’T SHOW FOR PRACTICE. The other men tilted their trucks off the road, half in the yard like always, and Billy lugged in his rhythm guitar as though it were heavy, Danny the new high hat for the drum set. But no bass guitar. No Stew.

  I’d baked the pumpkin bread Stew liked. I wore a fitted eyelet dress with tiny circles of skin visible. Clay dug into his new song about the suffering of God. It’s true he did not ask much of me. And he was, really, gentle as a leaf. Danny and Billy set up, and in the kitchen I crossed my legs and studied the circles of skin beneath the white material, the embroidery rounding up the circles’ tiny rims. Clay thought his guitar riff was new. I considered taking a slice of the warm bread to Lottie as I ought but I sat waiting for Stew, picturing his squared jaw, the lines etched around his eyes.

  Framed in the living room archway, Clay scribbled on his pad with his boy-tongue in his teeth. His butt at the edge of the easy chair, he shuffled his Bible concordance and paraphrased out loud, maybe to Danny affixing the wide cymbal, Hebrews 2:9: “We see Jesus, made a little lower than the angels for the suffering of death, crowned with glory and honor, that he, by the grace of God, might taste death for everyone.” Glad for some easy rhymes and leaning into taste and crowned. Out on the town, but he for you crowned. Taste death, waste breath.

  I pictured myself led down a path in darkness. I would see nothing, not my feet not my hand, only taste the darkness. Taste being the most intimate thing, more intimate than understanding.

  Billy and Danny thickened the living room, started tooling around with rhythm, with tuning, with simple chords. When present, Stew was lean like a piece of leather, like a body wrung to dryness, and his clothes folded smoke into themselves. Clay had never lost his baby face. I surveyed the kitchen, the sauce pans hanging on hooks, the fragrant nutmeg almost a visible specter over the cooling pumpkin bread, the ever-present blue chairs, one of which held me, and I placed my hands there—right there—upon my lower belly and fought some nausea. What would death taste like?

  The phone rang. I rose from the blue chair, muting my childish desire to cry or to vomit.

  “Frankie, it’s Jennie.” Stew’s wife. She asked for Clay but I said, “Where is he?” more adamantly than I should have.

  She was quiet. Then, hoarsely, “Sitting in his truck.”

  “What?”

  “Give me to Clay.”

  “Is it running?”

  “Not anymore it isn’t. It’s his third DUI.” She said they towed him from the ditch to the front yard, booted the truck, and took his license and let him sleep it off. “He hasn’t dismounted,” Jennie said, “just sits in there. He’s so stupid, he’s locked himself in, he won’t come eat.”

  “How long?”

  “Could they come over?” She was pissed and justified—I could see her full body bracing for some kind of retribution, as one braces for bad weather; I could hear the hurt dragged behind her voice, the way Clay dragged his dissatisfaction now, his song’s limitation and haltedness, as he came into the kitchen—I held out the receiver, “It’s Jennie”—and I watched him try to leave his feelings wadded in the corner in Ellis’s empty bed.

  We all knew Stew loved nothing more than that red truck. The feel of the cab, the six horses he had painted on the underside of the cab roof running in full slant. Clay and the others left in a righteous line of vehicles. They would try to pull him out, but he’d take his flask from the glove box, anchored. He would sit there into the night, a backslider backlit into silhouette by the shed’s dusk-to-dawn, sitting behind the wheel, looking upward, as if in prayer to the horses kicking up the dust.

  I had sat in Stew’s cab once, secretly, during band practice when they’d crowded in the basement. The Good News Boys were rehearsing for the next morning’s concert at Monroeville’s Heartland nursing home, where the old people would tap along out of sync. The tire tread looked good and uncaked; the truck was beautiful as ever, with its flames up the hood. I climbed in and stretched out on my back across the bench seat, pulling the door shut.

  It was magnificent. Why paint a cab roof, why paint up there unless you’re going to lie down and look up forever? A stampede, musky, the manes and tails blowing back, almost glowing in the dark. I thought how Stew must drive faster knowing half a dozen horses were in full gallop above him. I lifted up my blouse and put my hands on my belly; it subtly filled my hands but was taut. Looking down, the horses saw my black hair fan out as if in water as a body sinks, my face half whitened by the porch light.

  The drums carried, and I listened for the final trailing off of sound, when Clay would climb the stairs and seek out sweet tea and walk into the kitchen, saying my name, but I did not detect the silence when it came. I felt the bob of the pickup bed under something heavy, likely an amp, and I heard Danny’s voice and Billy’s more faintly, then Stew’s, close to the cab window. I didn’t sit up. I pulled my shirt down, the glow-in-the-dark horse manes like wicked little lashings—what would I say? But Clay hollered something that took Stew back inside, something he’d forgotten to pack up, or a final detail of the show for the old ones who would touch their own filmy sweet skin through the plodding choruses, and who would fall back to watch some fleeting self painted on the inside of their skulls, always there, running forward at a slant. When Stew opened the cab door, I was already gone, having spilled out, making sure I missed the other two. I’d sneaked to the back porch where there was no light on to show me to Clay or anyone.

  Now, with the men gone, Clay’s new song drifted around the silent house and into my head, and I thought about the taste of death and how it must mean more than simply dying. It was more intimate. It was like replacing the thing you love—your very life—with the palpable absence of it. I conjured Stew in the cab with the engine cut.

  The nausea persisted, but I finally sliced a piece of pumpkin bread for Lottie, slathered it with apple butter. I took it to her hospital bed that had a rail—like a child’s crib—where she slept with the tip of her braid in her hands, haloed by the wide white doily upon her pillow. I set the plate on the TV tray and watched her milky eyelids. The industrial bed was discordant with her rust-gold room with the cherry dresser and nightstand. When she’d fallen on the stairs and broken her hip, we had made the quiet, damning modifications to the house: bed, shower chair, color-coded arsenal of medications to thin the blood, to ease the blood’s pressure, to thicken the blood in turn. Without discussion, my caregiving days opened out in front of me like a road draped with heavy branches. I quit my janitor job at LaFaber, I packed my coveralls with name patch in a trunk in the attic and watched my future self waver in the light, holographic. I saw my long black hair fade to white and shimmer.

  The day I quit, I got drunk quietly on the back steps, the two- by-fours with gaps between to mind, facing the trailer ruins barely visible. Iridescent orange ribbon marked spindly trees to be cut that would not be cut, though the cinderblock corners that Clay had set in our first month of matrimony remained cemented there. Lottie would stay with us, and I’d keep my view of the woods from the kitchen window. I studied the ruins of a thing never built.

  My heart was no caregiver’s heart. I remembered a section from the Book of Leviticus, read during my homeschooling years barely supervised by Mave, instructions for how to ready the she-goat. A sacrifice to atone for such things as black thoughts, charred self-pity, narrowness. The exacting sacrifices of the old temple were in place for when your heart didn’t meet the standards of contrition. I remembered s
cribbling in the margin—words like hands shaping mud, the shifting, sliding muck of extant text. I wrote the tending and the dishing out of sweet pellets and making of straw beds in the barn, all the stroking of the short hair on the head between the dull eyes that ever sought high ground or food or mischief. How the she-goat would butt up against me and leave a bruise. Was she really demanded of the faithful? Or was it the faithless she died for? I drew the marsh reed in flower, remembering from one of your letters that the reed meant an address, meant O, as in O Lord, forgive me.

  O—and there was the shabby snow of fur falling, shaved from the neck before sacrifice. O Ruth, didn’t I hear a bleating?

  In my eyelet dress now, in the house emptied of The Good News Boys, I left Lottie’s bedside for the bathroom where I leaned upon the sink and cooled. In place of her old porcelain and pearl, softness and peach highlights in the towel sets, there was now steel and plastic, all things firm. But I was glad for the new bar bolted in by the toilet as I braced myself to heave.

  I knew when I’d conceived.

  A few weeks before, in the waiting room of the Monroeville clinic where we took Lottie for her appointments, Paul Rose had been there, a retired Army colonel, with his son, and they were talking about practicing boxing in the front yard, and two women I didn’t know were talking about paint for their walls. One woman held up pink paint samples.

  “You want Hibiscus?”

  “No, I want Dreamland,” the other said, “just because of the name.”

  The colonel made a comment to Clay about his capable son and Clay stuttered, which he never did. The men felt like a dense web, with the whole room turning Dreamland pink; I could see Clay shrink and I could see his seed in him, translucent and useless and humbled. I thought about how I guided his head for him in lovemaking, and how I pictured Dillon all the while with his dark wet hair and felt more relief than a trembling, and, if that fantasy did not work, I pictured Stew. Sex with Clay was all mechanics and gentleness, but that night I urged him to go at me hard, I coaxed him to it, I moaned something genuine and pictured no man but him, and the coming was bright—his, not mine, but I did not care, I knew he was getting his hurt out, his flaccid living. That’s when it had taken.

  Some of the pumpkin bread was nibbled away, but Lottie dozed again with braid in hand like a branch clutched by a dove. How ill-equipped I was at the sickbed. From skeleton out to aura, I felt thinned and vague. What I most feared was the bitter milk I’d deliver, like a Guernsey’s laced with ingested wild onions.

  Lottie roused, sat up, and spit out a morsel of bread.

  “Lottie,” I said, “I thought you were sleeping. Why didn’t you swallow?” Strings of apple butter spit striped her nightgown.

  “Good bread,” Lottie said, lying back down. I wondered whether she could sense my pregnancy as I dabbed her gown with a washcloth and put my hand to her damp forehead. “Good wife,” she said.

  She soon slept again. The downstairs was still empty except for Ellis sprawled in his kitchen bed. I put on my work boots to walk. Stew’s place was a couple of miles away, so by the time I’d get there, the men would be gone. I would see him silhouetted by the shed light and leaning his head back under his horses, Jennie inside bulling in the cabinets. I should have changed from the eyelet dress.

  It was dark. I felt, on my arms, the wet April air, the ever-present damp of this climate I had never not known. I could hear the seepage in the ditch. In the opposite direction lay Rex and Miranda’s, where spring water cooled those milkhouse stones, always the wetness, like a blacker color to things. No fade-out whitewash, no sun bleach. Even then I thought about how the desert must be bright and blackless and clear.

  A mile and a half down the road, about a hundred yards off, sat the Ellafritz house, and Stew’s lay beyond. Under the front porch light were two of the adopted Ellafritz girls, one standing and one sitting in a kitchen chair. The seated one lazily noted me with her gaze but said nothing. They were no more than fifteen but had a baby each, and some flesh spilling over their jean-cutoff waists, stretching their floral tank tops. They were doing each other’s makeup on the porch, taking turns, it seemed, in the chair. I watched from the road as one worked on the other, cigarette dangling off her lip, and I wanted a smoke. The seated one’s eyes closed and her lids went sheen with violet. A coffee can of soot for mascara, applied by Q-tip. I got close enough to climb their six steps, though they pretended I wasn’t there. An infant cried in the house but “Just a little longer” said the standing girl, her movements deft. She needed to get the coral perfect along the high ridge of cheekbone, brushing the cake of it in the compact and slanting the upward application, until her breasts hurt enough, like homing devices, longing for the tiny wailing mouth and squinted face. She went inside, leaving the other on the chair to light up.

  Belinda had told me the girls nursed each other’s sometimes. Neither of the girls was pretty. They weren’t going anywhere tonight; they looked unshowered. Grandeur only from the neck up. We were both in our own skulls, the girl and I, but she turned and looked me up and down. I felt she could see my belly hard. She could see the child starting there now, just a hive of cells. She picked up a shard of mirror, tilted up her chin.

  “What do you think?” she said. The foundation was caked on, but her lined eyes and her lashes sooted with homemade mascara did jump out.

  “Looks pretty,” I said.

  The other returned with an infant at her breast. She started in with lip liner with her free hand.

  I walked on, and the way their screen door sounded behind me, as one of them went inside, invoked my mother through the long hallway of time, the way she had stood on the porch once. She’d boiled water for ear corn and, afterward, walked outside to throw the silk-littered water off the side of the porch and not in the sink, and stood listening to the supper-hour night. I remembered her looking kind in that moment, though she was not kind, an image in the porch light to wake in the mind of her daughter years later. And now this one inside me would recall me in some way. I put my hand on my middle, over the eyelet, over the pair of eyes forming in the dark.

  By the time I got to Stew’s, the dusk-to-dawn on the shed was the only light. The house was dark, Clay and Danny and Billy were gone, Jennie likely asleep. I saw the beautiful red truck, the prize, its tire booted. Whenever Stew would speak, the words were like sparse growing things. Once, when buffing the rust from my pickup in his body shop, he’d simply said, “Come,” showing me the work he’d almost finished, kneeling to study the fender as I studied his temple and ear.

  I walked up to the truck in my white dress and put my open hand to the driver-side window. I waited for him to sit up full of horse taste, my palm like a light. I drew closer and tented my eyes to look in the window and saw the cab was empty.

  I WALKED THE NEXT HALF MILE TO MY HOUSE. I Still kept a few changes of clothes in the closet. I changed into a blue blouse I’d once loved and jeans and hung up the belted eyelet dress. Outside Mave’s, I saw the basketball long left in the peony bushes beside the house, lead-like. I wiped off the grime of old leaves, shot it toward the hoop Mave had put up for me on a two-by-eight. Air ball. Only the hoop was left, the net had disintegrated. I took a few more shots with the dead ball and, with each, I felt the darts in the sides of the blouse restrict, then I let the ball roll on.

  “Hey, come in here,” Mave called out the window. “I’ve got the bog people on.” She wore bathrobe and boots, gray hair frizzed. “The ancient Danes.”

  I refused a beer but sat with her in the PBS glow.

  “I wore this blue blouse one time,” I said, “and Clay said I looked nice. Then I hid it in my house and didn’t want to ever wear it again.”

  “Then why are you wearing it again?”

  “I don’t know.”

  On screen, the bog bodies of Denmark writhed without moving. A man from the fourth century BC looked like he’d simply gone to sleep except he’d taken an ax down the nose bone, bludgeoned was th
e word used, probably a human sacrifice thrown to the bog, which sucked the body down and sealed out all the air so centuries later he’d come up looking made of bronze. As if out the throughside of the LaFaber foundry. He still had lips, the voiceover said, and kidneys and spleen, his hair.

  “There must be something else out there,” I said.

  “Other than the old sacrifice?”

  “Other than this.”

  “Thinking in broad strokes, you have it pretty good. You have not been bludgeoned to death.” Mave held out her hand to chop, demonstrated the blow to her face in slow motion. “You’re not big- league in the tragedy department.”

  The voice said archaeologists could test the hair and know what he’d eaten, could study his stomach and tell us his last meal. Both skull and brain were intact. The peat moss, the cool bog acid, like vinegar, dissolved most of the bones but not the skin.

  “You’re shitting me,” Mave said to the TV. “Skin pickled like eggs.”

  I said, “Every day Clay hands me his lunchbox to wash and a thermos with coffee stains. My breathing is erratic. I feel the air sealing off.”

  “How’s Lottie?”

  “The same.”

  “Maybe you’re lucky with no air. Your hair will be preserved just the way you fix it.”

  “Bury me in this blouse after you bludgeon me.”

  “But once the body hits the air—look at that shit. They brought him up into the Denmark air and the change was violent and fast, he oxidized. They had to get him into that capsule before he dissolved like salt.”