An Arrangement of Skin

by Anna Journey

  Sally Swift employs the term “soft eyes” to describe how a rider should modulate her gaze in the saddle. While “hard eyes” isolate the sharp outlines, colors, and densities of objects (Snidely’s tawny ears shaped like Scotch bonnets, the drooping evergreen back-scratchers of the California pepper, the black rectangle of my husband’s cell phone recording my canter), soft eyes embrace the wide scope of peripheral vision, permitting more of the world to swirl by even as you glance at a curve or an oncoming jump. “Let the object be the general center of your gaze,” Swift instructs, “but look at it with your peripheral vision taking in the largest possible expanse, above and below as well as to the left and right.” Details, when one uses soft eyes, whiz past in an impressionistic flux—not a blurry onslaught, but sun-dappled and supple: a rollick through the painted pastels of Monet’s haystacks. Paradoxically, the more a rider takes in with her peripheral vision, the more acutely she’s able to perceive the singular shape and weight of her seat—her butt and thighs—draped lightly over the saddle.

  I’d like to be able to direct my soft eyes toward my childhood in South Asia, to conjure more of the periphery—more moments climbing the iron monkey bars built in front of the schoolyard’s massive banyan, or passing the domed Mughal relic of Safdarjung’s tomb—but I fear the false nostalgias of implanted details. I’ve stared at photographs and a video of myself cantering in the cracked-mud ring at Delhi Riding Club so often that I can’t tell many of my memories of horseback riding in India from the images captured by the camera. Do I really remember the gentle timbre of Raju’s voice or the patchy black wires of his beard or his burgundy turban, or have I created, with my hard eyes and through the easy hyperrealism of technology, a simulacrum? Is that flash of Dafadar Ji—the skinny, bent groom in his eighties who lived through Partition—real or recreated?

  I have a few memories I know, most likely, are my own. They don’t show up in the video, photos, or my mother’s stories. There’s the muscular white horse with a grey snout, Bull Bull, who had hilarious fits of rhythmic farting and would often emit a rubbery, flapping toot when my butt touched down on the saddle during a posting trot. There’s the quick teakettle burst of hot horse breath when Kara curled her lips back to accept my flat-palmed offering of chopped carrots. There’s the dressage move that involved making the horse prance backward. There’s the time during a trust-building exercise in which I lay my head on my bareback horse’s rump as I stretched my spine against her spine—finding that common skin—and stared up at the white New Delhi sky. There’s the day I nearly fell from a horse (I don’t recall which one) when I was first learning how to jump, and, had my mother witnessed the near catastrophe, she’d have never allowed me to return to my lessons. (The waiting area for parents was a circle of wicker chairs in the dirt near the stable, obscured from the ring.) I knew I needed to rise from the saddle in my “jumping seat,” lean forward, stick my butt out like a jockey, and hold the position over the jump, but I came down too quickly (or lost my balance) and bounced hard off the saddle. I fell sideways, like a top-heavy engagement ring slipping toward its neighboring knuckle, and dangled from one stirrup, upside down, until the horse slowed and Raju raced over.

  I also recall Raju leading us, a line of helmeted children on horseback, on a walk outside the razor-wire fence of Delhi Riding Club and into the teeming street, which was a sunlit jigsaw of rickshaws, honking cars, gaunt cows, beggars, and gauzy salwar kameez. My most vivid experience of India, beyond the high walls of my family’s white stucco house and pink dahlias, is that moment in the heat, noise, and scramble of the street.

  During my second riding lesson at Mill Creek, my horse Roanie, a strawberry roan, kept halting at a certain spot toward the far left curve of the oval ring, jerking his head to the side as if he’d spotted a rattlesnake or a swarm of bees. I couldn’t see anything alarming beneath the pepper trees. Jenna urged me to “be more alpha” and keep him going. “Left rein! Left rein!” she called. I tugged the outside rein. The next time around, Roanie stopped, once again, and looked intently to the side. “Left rein! Left rein!” I signaled with the rein and gave his flanks a squeeze with my ankles. Instead of picking up the trot, Roanie spooked, lurching forward and down as if he’d slipped on a banana peel. He crossed his front legs jerkily, like a break-dancer, and staggered sideways until he found his footing and hurried away from the spot that had frightened him. Instead of imagining myself as one of those legless, clown-faced, round-bottomed, wooden “roly-poly” dolls that automatically right themselves when pushed over (another of Swift’s colorful visualization techniques), I hunched and cringed in the saddle, balling the reins into one panicked fist while I groped the edge of Roanie’s pommel with the other, muttering, “Whoa, whoa.”

  Jenna rushed over. “You went fetal,” she observed. “A natural response.” I glanced down at Roanie’s sweaty, twitching neck. “But upright forward motion is always the safest motion,” she said. “That way, you have better balance.” I asked Jenna why Roanie had spooked. Did he see a snake or coyote in the brush? Hear distant traffic echo down the canyon? Startle easily? “Horses are like children,” she said. “They sometimes imagine things and freak themselves out.”

  In the section devoted to the correct use of breath in Centered Riding, Swift emphasizes the importance of a rider’s relaxed breathing from the diaphragm. Holding your breath, even for a few seconds, causes tension in the body and can make a horse uneasy. “You can breathe a horse to quietness,” Swift writes. “You can breathe him past things that scare him. If you hold your breath as you come to that big rock, he’d say, ‘She’s frightened! There must be gremlins there.’” Did I breathe weirdly and invent a gremlin that leaped through the pepper trees? Does Roanie now know me as a dabbler in equine hoodoo, capable of conjuring a ghost?

  Each time I watch myself riding Kara in the video taken in June 1988, I see a ghost. I look at a photograph, that “postcard of a little stranger,” and see a seven-year-old girl who spins archaic turns of phrase, whose chin juts out pre-braces. I see a girl whose lavish handwriting loops monkey tails across the page. I hear Raju call my name. I watch myself round the bend in the saffron ring, Kara kicking up dust, both of us slipping past the camera my mother must have been holding, until we vanish.

  PROLOGUE AS PART OF THE BODY

  “Guess how I spent my Halloween?” Captain Morgan asked me over the telephone. I hadn’t heard his voice in nearly five years. He spoke as fast as one of his humming tattoo guns. “I spent it in a graveyard,” he said, “in Salem, Massachusetts, drinking wine beside a pond with a Croatian witch!” I told him I wasn’t surprised to hear it.

  The last time we’d talked, Captain Morgan had sent me the text message, “Thinking of you,” beneath a photograph of a granite headstone engraved with my own last name. Five years ago, a nineteenth-century graveyard in Richmond, Virginia, had brought us together. He: an artist about to leave Richmond to open a tattoo parlor in Nashville. Me: a poet fleeing a breakup in Houston and a falling out with a close friend, Lee. I believed returning to Richmond—the city in which I’d lived for most of my twenties—and renting an apartment on the grounds of my favorite cemetery would help me recover. I could get by on funds from a recent literary grant and write poems all day, I thought, gazing into a landscape of rest.

  Captain Morgan had posted an ad online for the one-bedroom he needed to abandon due to his new plans: a spacious ground-floor unit in the cemetery’s former caretaker’s house—that grand lavender Victorian trimmed in ivory paint just inside Hollywood Cemetery’s wrought-iron front gate. As I scrolled through the rental listings, I recognized the house immediately. Amid the thorny evergreens and leaning headstones, the mansion resembled an iconic haunted house, replete with gothic spires, bay windows, scarlet drapes, and wraparound porch. When Captain Morgan opened the door of the apartment to give me a tour, his arms and neck poked from his T-shirt. My eyes moved over his tattooed skin swirled in dense sleeves of ink.


  I lived for three years with Carrick in our narrow brick row house on South Cherry Street, three blocks away from Hollywood Cemetery. The graveyard, designed in 1847 and landscaped in the “rural style,” rises on one side of the James River in a sprawl of grassy hills and foot paths clustered with its namesake’s deep green holly trees, gnarl-kneed magnolias, bark-sloughing sycamores, and three-story cedars that smell like cookie dough after the rains. Between trees tilt irregular rows of ivy-draped headstones: grey or rose-pink granite and strange white soapstones carved to mimic vine-shrouded oak stumps. My favorite graves: a pair of horizontal ledger slabs marking a married couple, Jonathan and Winnifred (I called them “Johnny and Winnie”), enclosed by a low brick wall at the steep riverside edge of the cemetery. The enclave formed a rhombus-shaped balcony overlooking the parallel lines of the railroad tracks below and the James River beyond. I’d nod to Johnny and Winnie, saying hello if no one else was around, and then hoist myself up to perch on the far wall and watch a coal train that idled beneath my feet or peer at clusters of sunbathers sprawled on flat rocks on Belle Isle across the river. Sometimes the wallop of bongo drums pulsed downwind.

  Hollywood Cemetery houses an eclectic mix of regional skeletons, including a number of major figures of the Civil War–era South: Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy; twenty-five Confederate generals, such as J. E. B. Stuart; a number of victims of the November 1918 influenza epidemic; Virginius Dabney, editor of the Richmond Times Dispatch (now nicknamed the Richmond Times Disgrace), who wore sharkskin trousers and won a Pulitzer for his work championing civil rights; the suffragette Lila Meade Valentine; James Monroe, the fifth president of the United States, whose tomb juts up from the middle of a sort of gazebo-sized, iron birdcage; and the Irish schoolteacher William Burke, who tutored the teenaged and not-yet-famous Edgar Allan Poe. In the middle of the graveyard sit several horseshoe-shaped “whispering benches” of cool white marble designed with concave backs that amplify and channel echoes. This way, a person seated at one end of a bench can whisper into the smooth curve over her shoulder and send her voice, with perfect clarity, all the way to the ear of the person at the opposite end. Carrick and I often sat on either side of the largest whispering bench. I don’t remember which messages we shunted to one another on the slope of an echo. Probably ordinary earfuls: “Can you hear me?” “Want to have lunch?” “Nice ass!” Past the whispering benches, downhill and along the snaking main asphalt road, the cemetery’s private mausoleums showcase the engraved surnames of prominent families, such as the eerie “Slaughter”; others glint their windows of royal blue, topaz, and scarlet stained glass; another’s rumored to house the legendary Richmond Vampire, sprung from the bloody wreckage of a caved-in railroad tunnel.

  During the time Carrick and I neighbored Hollywood Cemetery, I studied poetry as an MFA student in creative writing at Virginia Commonwealth University while he completed his undergraduate music degree. In the fall, when the steamy tidewater humidity diffused into a smoky coolness, I’d carry my classmates’ poems to the cemetery and sit under one of the ancient magnolias. I’d write “use ‘to be’ verbs sparingly” in the margins, advocating for more colorful verb choices. I’d raise an eyebrow as I paused to sip tap water from my canteen, thinking that the dead folks lying a half a dozen feet beneath me would surely be happy to employ any “to be” verb at all. And when the man who lived directly across the street from the cemetery erected a six-foot cross made out of chicken wire in his side yard (to ward off spirits, I imagined), I felt lucky to live in Richmond’s ghoulishly atmospheric neighborhood, Oregon Hill, with its gritty row houses of calico brick; weedy gardens crowded with metallic pinwheels and plaster gnomes; and pocked wall that still flaunts the painted signs for the cemetery and the long-closed Victory Rug Cleaning. Oregon Hill, a small plateau situated between two ravines, is a historically working-class neighborhood whose early nineteenth-century residents were a mixture of white and African American laborers and artisans, many of whom worked at the nearby Tredegar Iron Works plant. If I sat on the warped steps of my wooden porch on Cherry Street, chatting with my anachronistic Beat-poet neighbor, on my left rolled the pleasantly lukewarm James River and the lush hills of Hollywood Cemetery. Behind me lay other shaded streets named for local trees—Laurel, Pine—and now inhabited by rowdy students, an array of English and painting professors, and several Oregon Hill stalwarts such as the musician Apple Butter—known for engaging in fistfights with himself—and the city sanitation worker Poopy. There even lingered a few remaining descendants of folks who had moved to the neighborhood to be closer to inmates housed in the now defunct Virginia Penitentiary. To my right spread the campus of VCU and the offices of my mentors, their shelves in Anderson House filled with books. Or, as the alt-country band the Cowboy Junkies maps the ambivalent borders of the neighborhood in its bluesy, languorous tune “Oregon Hill”:

  A river to the south to wash away all sins

  A college to the east of us to learn where sin begins

  A graveyard to the west of it all

  Which I may soon be lyin’ in

  No matter how far away I get from Richmond—whether it’s the years I spent slogging through my PhD in the swamp and concrete of Houston, Texas, or ambling the jasmine-sweetened beaches of Venice, California, where I now live with my husband, David—it will always be my home. Anyplace else ends up feeling rootless and blanched, alarmingly ahistorical. I couldn’t wait to leave Richmond, actually. After eight years, I was ready to leave. But since I’ve left town, I’ve realized that Richmond, for better or worse, will always haunt me. Its slow, brown river and abandoned ironworks plant. Its horrifying past ties to the slave trade. Its corner diner with the walls mottled with collages and bisque doll heads. It’s where all my own ghosts lie. My two ex-boyfriends: Ed, the glassblower-Deadhead who went to jail for selling pot; Carrick, the jazz-and-bluegrass bassist who returned to Appalachia. My former apartments: the flophouse on Grove with my sewing machine perched on the ash-covered coffee table; the one-bedroom on Hanover with the perilous blue balcony; the place on Park in which my fashion-design-major roommate knitted a quasi-Victorian bustle of bulging tea roses she called, gloriously, “Butt Garden”; the row house on Cherry, the street next to which the dead and I slept equally well.

  In his 1936 essay “The Storyteller,” Walter Benjamin argues that the decline of the artisan class has imperiled the art of storytelling. The “two archaic types” of storytellers are, Benjamin suggests, “the resident tiller of the soil” (the farmer who stays put and nourishes local folklore and regional history) and “the trading seaman” (the journeyman who travels to distant places and returns with exotic tales). Storytelling relies on the art of repetition, Benjamin notes, and the art of telling erodes when “the gift for listening is lost and the community of listeners disappears.” “It is lost,” Benjamin writes:

  because there is no more weaving and spinning to go on while they are being listened to. The more self-forgetful the listener is, the more deeply is what he listens to impressed upon his memory. When the rhythm of work has seized him, he listens to the tales in such a way that the gift of retelling them comes to him all by itself. This, then, is the nature of the web in which the gift of storytelling is cradled. This is how today it is becoming unraveled at all its ends after being woven thousands of years ago in the ambience of the oldest forms of craftsmanship.

  I like to imagine Captain Morgan as one of Walter Benjamin’s archetypal yarn-spinners, a contemporary artisan tapped into the intricate rhythms of his craft, crouched over someone’s exposed skin as he weaves his stories to the drone of a needle. He’d once told an especially forgetful client to call him “Captain Morgan,” instead of “Morgan,” as a mnemonic. As the man recommended the tattoo artist’s services to friends, repeating the nickname, the moniker spread throughout Richmond, eventually prompting a legal name change. “It took on a life of its own,” Captain Morgan said. He told me he believes people seek to b
e marked by his ink due to an ancient impulse, a tribal instinct: “People come to me looking for something old.”

  “I talk a lot,” Captain Morgan said, laughing, over the phone, “so my friend the Croatian witch told me to be quiet for a minute so we could just drink our wine by the pond.” I’m reminded of the stories Captain Morgan told me during our one—and only—in-person exchange in Richmond. Over scrambled eggs and mimosas, he asked me to recite a poem. Here was someone who didn’t care that I’d cheated on my boyfriend of seven years with a poet twice my age, humiliated Carrick by the gossip that ensued, lost one of my best friends, Lee, who was also my most important literary mentor, and felt so wrecked by shame, shock, and a lacerating, self-aimed rage that all I could think to do was to vanish back into Richmond, where I’d once felt safe. I would change my story. I wouldn’t be the girl who dragged her boyfriend from Richmond to Houston, a place we both immediately loathed. I wouldn’t have sobbed in a bathroom stall in the middle of my dissertation defense, hoping someone—an undergraduate, a custodian, a professor from another department—would comfort me. I wouldn’t have tearfully confessed my circumstance to a Boston architect at a bistro bar in George Bush Intercontinental Airport, my black cat yowling from a mesh pet carrier in my lap. As I sat in the booth across from Captain Morgan in Richmond, I felt seen in a way that I hadn’t in a long time. My scandal had eclipsed my ability to focus on my writing and redefined several of my most important relationships, including the one I had with myself. Was I a bad person? Sociopathic? At least I wasn’t a murderer, although at times I’d felt like one.