Call It Horses

by Jessie van Eerden

  The night before, eating pizza, Nan had given her pepperoni to Ellis and said, “Let’s get one of those Airstream trailers, the little silver compact houses. We could live out here, you know.”

  Mave had said, “And one for Elijah, and one for Moses.”

  I’d laughed despite myself.

  That night, after I’d told Nan there was no book and she’d said Mave is near the end, after another little while—I didn’t write this before—Nan had asked me, “Did you ever meet Ruth?”

  I’d said no. And I’d said, “But I know she is the only one Mave ever loved.”

  “What about you? She loves you.”

  And I’d said nothing.

  In the car, Mave said, “It’s early. We’ll get many skies today, undented by buildings or roofs. We’re in the plains now.” Long breath refill. “Or maybe unpunctured. I’m unsure how much give the sky has.”

  “Good. Her drugs are working. I’m fucking hungry,” said Nan, mustering.

  “Thank you for your thoughtful contribution, Gypsy.”

  I pulled into the Arby’s drive-through with the clear if unarticulated idea that we didn’t want to waste time getting out.

  Oklahoma started with oil rigs pumping like huge thirsty birds. There were more trees than I expected. The wind pushed hard at the car, I kept two hands on the wheel.

  What I will tell you, Ruth, is that we were in the car about seven hours and they were bad hours. Stopping only for bathroom breaks, and there was no longer any pretense about shouldering Mave into the stall, walking her like the war wounded, as she’d walked my tender cousin Ron that day he stammered out his refusal to report to his post. I remember at one stop, near Oklahoma City, right before we passed the interchange to I-44, Nan and I were walking Mave to the restrooms at the back of a service station packed full of Western décor. Rodeo shirts and outlandish belt buckles and beaded medicine bags, turquoise everything. And Mave stopped us in front of a shelf of cow skulls, not bleached out like O’Keeffe’s but lacquered, the horns wrapped with tacky fake leather. “We’re getting close,” Mave said before we stumbled on to pee.

  I counted nine pain pills left, all the other medication of course flushed before we’d started, and then a confession that made me livid when I asked Mave if she was ready to switch out tanks, said maybe that would help.

  “I brought empties,” she said.

  “Empty oxygen tanks? Are you nuts? Are you really crazy now?” My anger melded with panic. “We’re finding a hospital.”

  “No hospital. Drive, Frankie.”

  “Why? Why are we doing this? This is suicide.”

  “Into the desert.”

  “We will not make it.”

  “We only need to make it far enough.”

  “Where is that?”

  What I will tell you is that Nan and I both begged her, finally, to go to a hospital, but Nan relented before I did. “I’m the one driving, I decide,” I said weakly, but somehow I kept heading west, on Interstate 40, as fast as I could, idiotically, blindly, the wind bullying us.

  “That’s it, drive,” Mave rasped.

  “Insane,” said Nan, but she said nothing more about stopping.

  WE CROSSED THE TEXAS LINE, into the panhandle, a rusted blue bullet racing a couple of parallel trains. Mave said O’Keeffe’s spiritual home was always Texas, so maybe it would do. She stuck her hand out the window, as if to test the air. “The wind feels different, Frankie. It’s a dusty desert wind. You got me out of the bog. It will do.”

  “Will do for what?” I said.

  She said it wasn’t what we’d planned, but maybe it was even better. The red canyons churning, the sun on the rocks. “Little Gypsy, don’t paint the canyon. Paint what the canyon makes you feel.”

  “What do you think you’re going to do, jump from a canyon ledge?” I still protested, though not with conviction. “You couldn’t even get up there. You’re too weak to get up there and kill yourself.”

  “Would be a lot easier if you hadn’t tossed the gun.” She pulled her paper bag of nine pills from the door slot and held them toward the backseat. “Help me with these, Nan.”

  “No you don’t,” I begged.

  “Go,” said Mave. “Be like the bighorn sheep. Be like your desert mothers. They’re your mothers, not mine. I was born of a toad. They are your better mothers, I was a lousy mother.”

  “Spare me.”

  “I’ve always spared you.”

  “You did your best.”

  “I spoke to you as if to Ruth. I didn’t respect you were small and hurtable, with more years ahead than behind.” Big awful inhale.

  “I’m not doing this,” I said.

  “I tried to count on your years behind you catching you like an old mattress. But nothing pillowed your fall.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “I know you fell,” she said.

  A long quiet. I heard atlas pages, I heard snout nosing limb, I heard the mighty Texas wind, the barer country, you could call it windswept.

  Then Mave said, “I remember going to one of your games and you didn’t know I was there. I was with Ruth then, wrapped up in her, home to see the twin boys when they were born. I didn’t stay long. Rex was sworn off me, but Miranda wanted me to see the boys. I drove down and drove right back, but I went to your goddamn game. You fell, you hurt your hip that time. It’s been like that with me and you.”

  “I don’t remember that game.”

  “I was there but I was never there.”

  I shook my head, firm despite tears coming. “You were always there.”

  It was not long in Texas—what, two hours maybe?—before we started to see the brown signs outside of Amarillo for Palo Duro Canyon State Park.

  “Get off the goddamn interstate,” she said.

  “No, it’s the quickest way.”

  “To where? We don’t need it. Where I’m going, I can go on horseback. I want to check out a horse.”

  “It’s not a library book.”

  “Rent it. Rent me a horse. A palomino mare.”

  Can you ever forgive me, Ruth, can I ever forgive myself for seeing also a blue square sign with an H and choosing not to exit for the hospital though Mave was there dying in the passenger seat, her pale cells fading, her wrong molecules gelling like fish eggs, the network of tubes now unfettering her face? “Palomino”—she loved the word and repeated it, the name, the word rooted in resemblance to a dove. Would you condemn me for following signs for Palo Duro, Palo Duro meaning hardwood? Because of the shrubs and trees fighting to live in such a place—the yucca, mesquite, and juniper, cottonwood, willow, and salt cedar. All these were fighting upward through the rock.

  The turns were few: just a hair to the south, on the outskirts of the town of Canyon where I knew O’Keeffe, young and heedless, had rented a room with many windows, as much sun as she could stand.

  “Do you read the prophets, Nannette?” said Mave.

  Nan was at a loss.

  “Me neither. Except that place where the prophet says the desert will break into crocuses. All the way out here, the whole point is desertscape, and I think, yeah, I do want the crocuses goddamn Miranda planted for me in the yard without asking my permission.” Her face unto the road showing lines of pain, sweat at her temples, on her whiskery lip. She was soaking wet. “Not just the desperate yellow rose of the prickly pear, either, that bulges like a boil with pus. The black bear eats the prickly pear, and when the bear finds the crocusàvoil——the wet cup for bees, he eats it and tastes a memory of being in a fertile place, of when he was under seawater in darkness. The only place a crocus matters is where it ought not to be.”

  Her mouth tender and harsh, her mothering of me a coaxing, a crocus, a strange set of smoke signals speaking from her house to mine through a break in the fence.

  “Stop here,” Mave said.

  “No,” I said.

  “Now you’re the one who doesn’t want to stop.”

  “I’m not st
opping.” I shook my head wildly.

  But I stopped, the sand and gravel crunching under our tires. Old West Stables stenciled in yellow on the sign. A small dusty office and a set of paddocks, one holding a dozen or so horses. I turned off the ignition, we sat like fools in our blue steel vessel. We were a mile or so from Palo Duro, the rocks cropped up in the distance, the carved claystone we’d driven all the way out here to see. “The ancient life is buzzing,” said Mave. “You hear that buzzing? Is it my tinnitus?”

  She did not get out of the car. About this time, I was weeping like a rock cracked open for thirsty wayward people.

  She looked at me, held out the pills. “Help me, Frankie. I’m ready. I want to ride a palomino horse down into the canyon. I wish to be small atop a large beast that knows how to take care of everything.”

  It was Nan that got out, letting Ellis take off to be alarmed by the horses stirred up. She opened Mave’s door. I didn’t move, no way. Nan squatted down, took the bag from Mave’s hand, and emptied the white pills into her palm and clasped them. She asked me gently for the cola cup in my door’s cup holder. I gave it to her and she helped Mave take the pills two at a time, with deep swallows. Then she hefted Mave at the arm, but Mave softly shrugged her off, struggled alone to her feet and walked on, almost bowlegged, to be funny or simply aching through her lower body. Her head glared.

  Nan stood there solid and able, not a waify, hungry thing, though she wore the same apricot dress she’d showed up in. I saw her somehow bleached clean by the Texas sun, her acceptance of Mave’s choice, of the limits of the body, much braver than my obstinacy. I knew she would be able to paint the skeletons heaped up by desert drought, stare them down and expose what the skulls made her feel.

  What on earth did Mave tell the man inside the stable office, with her bald head and scant air and whitened wet face, that convinced him to let her emerge from the building wearing his cowboy hat with a feather in it, and off he went to saddle something. What kind of man would take one look at her and not call an ambulance?

  He was tall. He escorted her to a fence post which she leaned all her weight on, about to fall. Nan and I were both out of the car now.

  “What did you say to him?” I reached to touch the hat brim.

  “I promised him a night with you, Gypsy,” she said. “Don’t be mad.”

  “Fuck off,” whispered Nan, tenderly.

  The man brought out a horse saddled, bridled, deep brown with a black mane. It put its nose to Mave’s shoulder. “Steady, boy, whoa, Nellie,” said Mave. “I think his name is Spirit.”

  “Leroy,” the man said.

  “Okay, Leroy.”

  The man didn’t really smile, but he had a knowing kind of hand, handing her the reins and helping her walk alongside Leroy’s baleful, living bulk, each of his heaving breaths taking one of Mave’s away as the excess of drug moved through her stomach lining and out into her coursing blood. Her breaths almost countable now. Can you feel this happening, Ruth? Can you feel my heart breaking? The heart that has doubted love as a thing I’m fit for, but I see, of course I see now, it is the only option. Can you picture the tall dream-like man setting out the stepstool for Mave, then hoisting her, like a windless sack with legs, to sit astride the horse, where she looked like a little girl, her hat, his, cocked until she righted it, wiping her face as though thinking the tubes were still netting her? He took the reins, he walked big Leroy toward a ring enclosed with fence where Ellis had his front paws up on a bottom rung, taut barrel body panting.

  “Is it a palomino?” Nan asked me.

  “I don’t know,” I said. All things blurred.

  “They’re lighter colored than that maybe,” she said.

  He led Mave on Leroy around the red-dusty circle, a little girl on a show horse, and she was as tall as she could be in her ever-present flannel, like a semaphore flag she’d spoken with, saying: I’m here. Learn to canter, learn to be boss, Little Thing; learn to turn in your heels for the steep canyon trails all slated up into white sky. You ride into the desert sun and you sense the scarce river where the river carves in, you go on, I’ll be okay, I’ll live, here in this world.

  And when I gathered her in, almost on her final breath, when I held her like that, and the man let me, steadied the horse, and I brought her down slowly from the saddle and caught her whole body soft as a baby, what kind of love would you call that? That’s what I’m writing now to ask you, you who know all the living words. What word? What name? Tell me, what kind of name does it have?

  I AM GRATEFUL To Black and Grey Magazine, which published the material on pages 81-82, in an earlier form, as the prose piece “Swine.”

  I would like to thank West Virginia Wesleyan College for the Faculty Innovation Grant that offered me time and space to work on this manuscript, along with the Writing Workshops in Greece that offered me the same. I would also like to thank Richard Schmitt, William Schneider, my agent Michael Snell, and Dzanc editor Michelle Dotter for reading earlier versions of the manuscript and helping to bring this novel into being.