Call It Horses

by Jessie van Eerden

  “Did she even bleach it?” Mave asked. “All the maggots. Look how one finger slips into the jagged nether space of tooth.”

  No, not like a newborn, but like a lover’s head. As if she could drink from it, drink all its fluids into the body, if there had been any to drink.

  Mave said, “Everything she painted was dream and object at once. That is really the skull. That is really the bone mouth, but it’s also something else. Later on, when she advanced and her abstract work got twisted by the interpreters who were supposed to be so well versed in paint, her message got garbled, she didn’t like what they had to say. So, she stuck to the cow skull. Uninterpreted.” Mave had rarely been in that neat kitchen. It made her look extra ragged and out of place.

  I nodded, I bled, I sat at the table in the hard blue chair, but she kept standing, about to go.

  “You, with the big life in you,” she said, another attempt. I didn’t know whether she was talking to the skull or the painter or me—or you, it seemed always she really addressed you—whether she was voicing O’Keefe or her own graying, unraveling self. She nodded, I nodded. It was two days after I’d miscarried and Clarissa had stayed with me in the hospital and Mave had lurked in the waiting room. Wouldn’t sit down, Clarissa said.

  That page with the photo I handed back to Mave. “You keep it,” I said. “So we both have one.”

  I WROTE ON LOOSE LEAF IN THE EVENINGS. I wrote every feeling and flick of ear and bird purchase, blade of grass, blade of anything, and then, empty, kept writing nonsense, words like dry heaving. They might have been letters, to a dead you or to my dead former self or to my dead mother. Probably to you but it was babble, and I threw pages away as I wrote them. Over time, when I was able to sleep less, I spent the afternoons with Lottie. Clay went back to work part time, swapped hours so he could be with her all the mornings I was gone. Noon, I came in earthy, but I cleaned up and clocked in as caregiver as he clocked out and headed to the day’s paving site. I wiped her mouth and sometimes sponge-bathed her, baked something, lotioned her purple feet. My favorite part was unfurling her hair as I’d always wanted to. It was thinned to cobwebs, so fine but still long. I brushed and rebraided it. She was in a place of gray whispering, difficult to hear. I took Murphy Oil Soap to every wood surface so the astringent clarifying fumes kept us both in this world. She held her braid and whispered. Ellis was offended by the fumes but trailed me anyway, always underfoot. When I remembered the baby bird he’d chomped that once, helpless in the grip of instinct, I shoved him away with my foot, not hard, his eyes watery in bafflement. It’s okay, I said to him, but I needed a radius of air to cushion from his big mouth and wet nose and aliveness.

  The doctor said it was Lottie’s heart, but it was mostly the mysterious ailment of old age. I entered the kitchen with a cutting of the late leaf lettuce one day in early June, and Clay was flustered, said she didn’t know him for a minute. Her face and eyes had gone blank. That night, he wanted to try again. Please. I said okay because his mother was dying, because he’d been so kind. My breasts were struck dumb but he gently worked them, like dough, and I vaguely realized that he had grown more experienced with me, less mechanical. The oak headboard was a stubborn thing I pressed my hands to, his fingers thick but not fumbling, I supine, and he finished with a cry I did not recognize as his. I could not read his grief, it was written in a tongue different from mine. But I knew I owed it to him to try, as Clarissa had said, to translate and interpret.

  “I’m moving band practice back here,” he said.

  “Okay.”

  “In the basement, so we’re not too loud.”

  “Okay.”

  He didn’t want to leave me or Lottie to the mercy of evenings. The Good News Boys would set up between the deep freeze and washer and dryer. I could barely remember the former time, when I would have quickened at Stew’s lanky body in the doorway.

  Saturday, in the greening night-haze of June, they loaded in, the trucks in their usual tilted line at the road. Soon, the tsst tsst of the high hat. I sat at the kitchen table and put my ear to it, as if to a sea-shell to hear ocean. I could not lift my head. Ear suctioned to table, as if to a tomb wall for all the silence that drowned out the rhythm guitar. Tell me why, Dead Buried Ones in this tomb, I thought, with your arms crossed caging your heart, how have I slipped this far into my life and it is a stranger’s life?

  The phone rang. Clay wouldn’t hear it and I would have to pick up. But I let it ring. Silence, then, a few minutes later, it rang again.

  I knew before she started in that it was Belinda with her whiny injury voice turned on, the voice that says: Where have you been, why are you not witnessing my turned-upside-down life over here in Jack’s ranch house with my new son, and also you’re worrying me. I’d never told her about the baby that was and then wasn’t. It’s true I’d not seen her for a month, since her shower in the community center. She said last Sunday she and Jack picked up his great-aunt Virginia at Heartland Nursing Home in Monroeville to take her to church at the Crossing—they picked up new people each week, she said brightly. I knew Virginia from my childhood in the pews. Virginia was now their small powdery package to deliver, and Belinda said the aides had her nails painted red and her hair permed.

  On the phone line, I heard the newborn’s cry, like a rifle report.

  She chattered on, my head full of gauze. She said on the drive back to Heartland, Virginia wept when she saw her old trailer and put her hand up to the car window. I knew that trailer. It sat near an access road and a culvert over Heather Run—it looked like a demolition derby car.

  I said, “You should’ve taken Route 9 back instead, it probably killed her to have to see her empty place.”

  “That’s the long way,” Belinda said, “and Jack had golf on ESPN. Anyway, come see me. Come see Roger. I think he favors Daddy in the face.”

  We hung up. Somewhere in my chest, the specter of Virginia lodged—she still wept her ineffectual tears as she situated herself on her strange narrow nursing home bed, frayed and bony as a hungry rabbit. The gauze tore in me then, somewhere within my brain, I could barely feel it, but I felt it. Virginia who’d had her nails done. Why take her out of there when she would only have to feel the shock of internment again? I laid my head back down on the tabletop tomb wall, I listened again for silence, but a hand pried me up, each of its fingernails Revlon Red. I felt a pulse of strength in places grown foreign, in my mouth, in my groin.

  My husband rhymed Christ in the cement-floor basement. Tell me, Virginia—I said in my skull—if I pass my decrepit home on a drive back to my one-day rabbit hole, will I weep out of longing for it?

  THE DAY CLARISSA’S DARRELL DIED, the Army came for my cousin Ron, one of Rex and Miranda’s twins. 1990. June. He’d quit the flagger job at the Division of Highways and enlisted, maybe because he was the slender, stuttering, brooding one, in the shadow of his brother Benji’s bright athletic build and aptitude. Ron’s duffle was packed, but when the recruiter pulled up, Ron locked himself in the bathroom. I was with Mave when Miranda called crying—Rex was not there, had left for Weston that morning for a load of fertilizer, having already said his goodbyes. Miranda had tried talking to Ron through the bathroom door. The recruiter was getting impatient.

  “Fuckers,” Mave said. We drove my truck over. “Napalmers, goddamn babies with guns,” a string of pacifist froth. We pulled up as the recruiter took a stance on the porch as if he were commandeering the house, Ron’s duffle beside him, and Miranda beside the duffle, curved and slight in sweatpants and a long T-shirt.

  Mave said nothing. She gave a mocking salute, tromped across the porch in her heavy boots, and went inside. I got out but stood beside the truck. We all stood waiting. The primrose alert, the paint peeling on the house that had aged like Miranda, the geraniums top- heavy in antique milk-pail planters. I felt time, like a presence, taking things from us.

  Out came Mave, Ron’s arm around her shoulder as if wounded in war, feet draggy, all in army
green and brown. Always a lean, unsure boy with feathered hair, now in a fresh buzz cut. They walked off the other side of the porch into the grass toward the pasture, toward the Guernseys all bearing stolid witness, soft strewn sentences from Mave’s lips I couldn’t hear. I felt a childish pang of jealousy. They disappeared before anybody spoke. The recruiter vouched for the caliber of his usual recruit, who had what it took. He left.

  I didn’t know where Mave was taking my cousin so adamantly, so tenderly, a boy she hardly knew, really, since Rex had always kept her at a safe distance from the kids. Miranda and I stood for a while in the strange wake of it, I by the truck and she on the porch, feeling in our bodies a helplessness. She sank to the porch steps. I joined her. She wasn’t aware of the miscarriage, or maybe she was. Maybe Mave had told her.

  “I don’t know my boys anymore,” she said. “I don’t know why he ever enlisted. I’d expect Tuffie to enlist before him.”

  “Tuff’s too wild for the military to handle.”

  Miranda smiled, smoothed her sweatpants as she would her usual pressed housedress. Her hair had not been combed; it seemed the recruiter had ambushed them. She asked after Lottie.

  “Slipping,” I answered. My hair felt heavy and I lifted it from my neck, and as naturally as anything, Miranda, shifting one step above mine, gathered my hair into her hands in a horse tail and kept gathering, which made me cry.

  I asked, “Do you remember how Dillon wanted to enlist in the Air Force to fly jets but he didn’t have the eyesight?”

  “I do.” She kept gathering—my hair so endlessly outspread and in need of gathering. Mave’s tenderness toward the boy, Miranda’s toward me, and Dillon’s toward whomever. “You still think about him, Frankie?”

  Oh—I thought his thoughts, I heard his fingers through my hair with hers, I felt the taut skin of his belly as I lay my ear on it under the branches on the banks of Heather Run.

  “I just wonder about him sometimes.”

  Darrell died that evening in a deep gray dusk withholding rain.

  His complaints of dizzy spells and blurred sight had turned out to be minor strokes preceding the final major one. He’d gone out to run the combine and hadn’t returned for dinner. Clarissa found him in the little pilot car of the mammoth machine, followed its final crooked swath where he’d gone off course, his head down on the control board as if napping.

  CLARISSA HELD THE WAKE AT THE HOUSE, in the old way. The living room stuffed with flower arrangements, the kitchen laden with casseroles and potato salad. Our friend Liza and her mother assigned potluck dishes, Liza practiced in widowhood.

  Tess came home from summer classes. She had somehow fastened her ropy hair in a stylish pile atop her head under a scarf like Rayletta wore. She hovered near her mother like an older sister and held her hand. I watched their hands, and the other hands holding Dixie paper cups or a fork, or an elbow, or a blinking toy. I stood with Clay, whose one hand carried our assigned cornbread and whose other hand pressed the small of my back where the dress waist bunched, as if to say, Don’t let me lose you in the crowd, people are being lost, people gone like pale streaks in the sky. I wore a mint- green dress. I carried a paint box that I’d found for Clarissa at Mave’s. It had been yours, of course, Ruth, tucked into a closet with books that hadn’t fit on her makeshift shelves, the font on each miniature paint bottle gold and antiquated, ochre, cobalt.

  Mave was nowhere, perhaps still with Ron in his camouflage and Army-issued boots, bivouacked on the outskirts of town.

  Would Clarissa design the plate of his headstone at LaFaber? She designed everyone else’s. I wondered, after all the hardness from him, what she truly felt in her supple body about his pale-streak goneness. I remembered all the times she had come to me after a beating, her hair always falling in pieces across her face. Eventually we came around her with a restraining order, he repented, he would change, and he did, the bruises slight after that, but his drawled dark voice—Tess told me—held an invisible hand at Clarissa’s throat. His demands swarmed her, pressed her, but she would not leave him. She made her tiny paintings on tiny dried gourd slabs in secret, she made toys from old beads, Tess gave her oil pastels and she closed her eyes and drew the contour of their alfalfa field under stormy sky, drew it blind, drew it by feel.

  I watched Clarissa standing near his open casket, his hands folded on the chest of his light blue suit. Her womanhood was stark, her wifeliness. An insistent memory disrupted this vision of her: once, during a LaFaber League game, Clarissa had gone for a half-court shot right before the buzzer sounded. Too feminine to really feel the court and move with it, she always shot air balls, but that game I saw her wind up her whole body and spring load and heft the ball off the tips of her fingers with gruesome force. She missed wildly, but she actually overshot. The few seconds after, she stood disbelieving her own strength, still standing on the toes of her Hi Tops, her breasts springing lightly in the jersey and an O on her red lips.

  Now a woman planted beside her dead husband, now the stream of faces and hands. Miranda, diminished but changed out of those sweats into a lavender dress, herded Belinda’s two, held the third, the newborn boy, Roger, as Belinda spoke to Clarissa and Tess. Tuffie was there, in all black, Rayletta and Hope from the co-op with their husbands, Jennie without Stew, the large extended Tide family, and the Snyder’s Crossing pastor, who was perhaps bothered that he had not been involved in the wake. I stood with Clay by the burgundy armchair and the lilies bursting from their vases on the floor like hands trying to grab a rope. I gradually moved away from him, into the receiving line, with the paint box.

  You understand, Ruth, I was not quite myself. I was still hidden, in a way, still clawing out the gauze. Voices swelled mildly on the front porch, in greeting, someone not seen in a while. I couldn’t discern the welcoming voices, or the welcomed. Only footsteps scraping and a shuffle of bodies. I watched the front screen door open.

  He ducked in as if the door were low. He peeled off his ball cap from back to front in one quick, deferential motion, threaded his thick hair, black like mine. Sharp nose and narrow face like mine. Some beard, some crosshatch on the skin and redness, darker skin around his eyes. His old Army jacket, the full oncoming streak of him.

  “Dillon,” someone said and shook his hand and he smiled. Then others.

  I stood near the casket, near the mute blue dead. Across the room Dillon smiled at someone else. He erupted through time, a spike punched through the gauze into the blank expanse of the days of my life as I lived it then. How many years? Twelve? Fifteen? He did not see me. My chest shrank in asthmatic constriction, my breaths shortened, and I touched all parts of the paint box which was unlidded, more like a paint tray with a handle in the center, like a shoe shine kit. I touched the jars of acrylic, ochre cobalt sienna goldenrod smoke, their names so touchable, Ruth. A slot on one side held two wood-handled horsehair brushes you had carefully used once or twice, which I had rinsed and softened. It was for Clarissa, but I set the paints at Darrell’s feet inside the coffin, in a panic, and I weaved through the crowd with what breath I still had. Through the kitchen, out the door to the side yard where no bodies congregated.

  From the glove box of my truck, I grabbed the paper bag always stowed there, put it to my mouth. The truck was blocked in. I stumbled toward the field, in out, in out, the wheeze not deep yet but frantic to find its tunnel to my lungs, in out, in out. Bugs rose to small storms, disturbed from their feeding by my legs and by the gale of loose mint dress when I ran, once I could breathe. I ran through Darrell’s half-uncut alfalfa into the woods, into the swamp mallow and skunk cabbage—suffocating and too familiar, but I wanted it then—the marsh slopping black onto my shins and calves. The suck of the ground and slap of low leaves reduced me to girlhood.

  Thicker into the woods the air went dense. I breathed into the bag again and closed my eyes. A thrush mourned, another answered incongruously with a trill of joy. I walked, eyes closed, letting branches snag my hair. I walked a
ll the way to the spring source of Heather Run where the moss seeped. I calmed and believed I would walk back to Clarissa when I could, I was glad Tess was there, I would go back. She needed me. I did not go back, though. I knew where I was going. I walked to the Train Cave.

  I’d always loved how you could feel more than see the cool outstretched limestone. The hush deepened into the ground, ancient and transgressive and moldy. Several yards in, I stood just shy of where the dark swallowed everything and let my eyes adjust. I heard the mutter of water. I breathed. Beer cans peeked into my settling vision, the foil of chip bags, crumpled blankets hiding condoms I didn’t need to look for. The Train Cave where high school kids still drank and fucked. As I had once. I was the twenty-something aching for a Dillon absent even as he was inside me, then I was the adolescent, and then even younger, when Dillon and Clarissa and I had played cards as kids, packing in RC Cola and flashlights. Then—there in the cave like a hologram—the boy who tied a string in my thick hair, who salved and shared the solitary in me.

  From the evening light washing through the cave mouth into the small anteroom, I made out a battery Coleman lantern someone had left behind. I turned it on and held it up, the shine dim. Tusks of stalactite, stalagmite, words I loved to say, rustle of bats, pools of the eternal wet. Lichen sleeved a flat rock, and I sat. A little cache of Coors right behind it, and animal-raided snacks, shreds of dollar-store bag. My dress and underwear instantly soaked through. I was cold.

  I turned to the cave wall to scan the old graffiti. But the graffiti was not old. It looked new. I stood and touched it—not even dry. Bold colors like the ochre and cobalt in the paint box, brush painted, I guessed, not the feathery traces of aerosol.