Funerals for Horses (retail)

by Catherine Ryan Hyde

  “No, he’s my brother Simon.”

  I know he’s thinking we look nothing alike, but he won’t say so. He says only what is necessary, a quality I respect.

  “Up the road another twenty miles or so, toward the long mesa, on this road, you’ll find some shops. Not even a town, really, just a trading post, a feed store, and a hogan sort of a building where a man sells hunting rifles. The man’s name is Sam Roanhorse. He’s a friend of mine. We race pigeons together. About two months ago he told me a white man came into his shop and bought a rifle and ammunition. I don’t think he would have thought much about it, other than it was a good cash sale, but the man wore only overalls. No shirt or shoes. And he came on foot and left on foot. Not in the direction of any civilization, either. North toward the mesa. Sam wondered what sort of a man would walk in this heat with no shirt. He said the man’s shoulders were badly sunburned. Would your brother do a thing like that?”

  I shake my head, words slow to cut through this flood channel of new information. It sounds like something I would do, but not my brother Simon.

  “I don’t know. But I’ll find your friend Sam Roanhorse and show him the picture.”

  “Yes, do that, if it’s important to you. And I know it must be, if you’ve come this far.”

  I don’t know how far he thinks I’ve come, but I feel no tendency to argue. I will accept whatever he says he knows.

  When my feet are bandaged and eased back into my boots, I hobble inside, with my host’s permission, to drink water from his faucet. It will be several weeks, he says, until he can open as a restaurant. There is so much work to be done. He has only just purchased land, house, diner. The previous owner he classifies as a sloppy man.

  No food yet, but he offers me a gift of the leftovers from his packed lunch, a round of fry bread, an apple and a pear.

  “My wife always packs more than I can eat.” Then he asks if I have a guide. “I think you must,” he says, “or how could you sit on a porch with the very man who can tell you where to look next for your brother? I don’t believe these things happen by accident. Do you know what I mean by a guide?”

  “I’m not sure I do. No.”

  “Where I grew up, which is right here in the Navajo Nation, it would usually be an animal.”

  “Oh, you mean like a spirit guide.”

  “What else is there but spirit?”

  After digesting this comment for a bit, I explain that I had a hawk, but he seems to have left me behind.

  “Then he was not your guide. Or if he was, you left him behind.”

  “Maybe I found my way to you not by guidance, but by an ability within myself.”

  “Of course,” he says. “All guidance springs from an ability within yourself—if only the ability to be guided.”

  He tells me his name is Everett Ankeah. He asks if I will join his wife and him for dinner later that evening.

  “You should walk at night anyway. Midday, now, is the time to rest in the shade. Besides, she always cooks more than I can eat.”

  THEN:

  Simon checked me into the hospital on Monday morning for my skin grafts, and I worried that he missed too much time from work because of me.

  He sat with me during all the visitors’ hours, which only amounted to about four a day, and Willie came to see me both days on her way home from work, and brought flowers.

  I left the hospital on Wednesday afternoon. I was supposed to stay in bed for three days, but I walked to the old folks’ home to see my friend. I just called her my friend by then, tired of arguing with DeeDee over whether it was Mrs. Hurley or not. I didn’t take my pain pills because I didn’t want to get foggy on the trip. I didn’t mind the pain. It felt clean and functional. I brought Willie’s flowers to give to my friend, who swore her name was Ruby McBride.

  She looked an awful lot like Mrs. Hurley, I thought, the smile, the sense of humor, the grace, but DeeDee said her teeth were too straight, her face too full, and she didn’t wear her hair in a braid. I took this to mean only that DeeDee had gotten in the habit of watching for details that carried no meaning.

  I sat gingerly on the wooden chair by her bed, first pulling out a little slack in my loose sweatpants. They’d taken a piece of skin off the top of my thigh to transplant onto my wrists.

  She sat up in bed, legs dangling over the side, and a beam of sun through the bare window lit up her face with its own special character. Round and friendly. A flicker of a thought said it might not be the exact same special character as Mrs. Hurley, if I could remember her.

  I volunteered to massage Mrs. McBride’s feet, something I used to do all the time for Mrs. Hurley. She used to call me an angel every time I did. She used to say the good Lord must not mind drinkers and gamblers, because he saw fit to send down two angels of her own, to make her last days luxurious.

  “Won’t it hurt your wrists though, love?”

  “Oh, no, they don’t hurt a bit.” It was easier than explaining that pain had become an ally, and actually my thigh hurt a lot worse.

  I pressed my thumbs along Mrs. McBride’s instep, enjoying the look and feel of the shiny dark skin, so much like hers, although DeeDee and some part of me said that Mrs. Hurley’s feet might have been a little bonier.

  She asked me to tell her something about this Mrs. Hurley. I didn’t answer. First because I didn’t remember. Then because the pain wasn’t welcome anymore, and I wanted to go home.

  I ran most of the way.

  When Simon got home he was angry.

  “I had to take off work early to go see your principal. He wants to know what we’re going to do, Ella. You’re going to have to take your freshman year all over again, because now you’re flunking the summer school that was supposed to get you through. I keep asking you about it, and you keep saying you’ll go, and you never do.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t be mad at me, Simon.”

  “How can I help it, Ella? I work so damn hard—”

  Mrs. Hurley used to try to teach me to get mad. It was upsetting to her, how much help I needed. She’d never met anyone who couldn’t do it naturally. She’d have me practice in front of a mirror, pretending to talk to someone like Grandma Sterling. “Repeat after me. Just who in hell do you think you are? I parroted the words, but remained unclear on the concept, and watching her own anger rise didn’t help.

  Simon made salami sandwiches, then handed me a fresh peach he’d bought on the way home. We didn’t talk while we ate.

  After dinner we walked down to Hollywood Boulevard, to the appliance store. On the way I asked Simon to please not be mad at me.

  “I’m not exactly mad, Ella. More like frustrated. Do you know what I’d give for a chance to go to school?”

  At first it sounded like a good idea. You go to school, I wont. But the catch was there, obvious, too obvious to run through.

  As long as he had to be the one to work, he said, he at least wanted to know that I was using that opportunity while I could.

  “But I can’t, Simon. I just can’t.”

  We seemed predisposed to butt again and again into a built-in stalemate, because I couldn’t say why not. I might almost have told Willie, but not Simon. I couldn’t possibly bear to have Simon feel all that shame on my behalf.

  We walked in silence past the Hollywood apartment houses, with their green lights trained onto palm trees and motel-like railed outdoor stairs.

  A crowd was gathered on the street in front of the appliance store. Simon had to hoist me onto his back so I could see. Most of our fellow onlookers were bums and winos, bag ladies and prostitutes. Everybody else had their own TV at home.

  I watched the surface of the moon on the seven displayed television screens, and wondered why I liked it better through Virgil’s telescopes. Then it hit me. It wasn’t supposed to have some clown in a space suit bouncing around on it. It was ruined.

  “Why’d they take it away from us, Simon?”

  “Take what away?”

  “The
moon.”

  “They didn’t. They just stuck an American flag in it, and now they’ll pick up some rocks and stuff.”

  “That’s what I mean.”

  I looked up at the man in the moon and wondered if he felt the way people in the newspaper say they feel when their houses have been burglarized, or when they’ve been molested. I knew I did. It melted into a heavy feeling in my stomach, a depression that pulled me down closer to the sidewalk. I wondered if I felt any heavier to Simon.

  When the coverage turned mostly to repetition, and I threatened to fall asleep on Simon’s back, he let me down and we walked home.

  “Think we’ll ever get it back again, Simon?”

  “It’s not gone, Ella. Look. It’s right up there.”

  It was there all right, but not in the same way. I knew then that the answer was no. I’d never get it back. Some things, like innocence, only go one way.

  “I want to stop and call Uncle Manny,” he said at the corner.

  “Don’t we still have some of the money Dad gave us?”

  Simon shook his head. “The insurance company only pays eighty percent.” He indicated my wrists with a glance.

  “I’m sorry, Simon.”

  He stepped inside the phone booth. He held the door open for me, because usually I liked to come in with him, but I only shook my head. It was too crowded in there, with DeeDee, but I couldn’t say that. He’d say DeeDee was dead. He’d been saying that a lot lately, and I didn’t intend to invite him to say it again.

  I heard his words filter through the door, little bits and pieces of them. I tried to shut them out, squinting at the moon, trying to see it the way I had before.

  “Well, how is she... ? Not at the house, that’s for sure. I don’t know if this is a good time at all, as far as Ella’s concerned... I’ll ask her, but if it’s too much for her.... Yeah, if you would... I don’t know, whatever he can spare. It’s been a bad time for money. Yeah, okay. Bye.”

  He stepped out, and I turned to look at his face, and I saw it just the way I saw the moon, violated, like the loss of innocence, the sort of change that doesn’t change back.

  “Uncle Manny says Mom’s home.”

  “Oh.”

  “He says she’s a lot better.”

  “That’s good.”

  “She wants to see us.”

  “I’m not going back to that house.”

  “I know. How about if we just had dinner in a restaurant?”

  “I guess.”

  As long as she doesn’t touch me, I thought, but I didn’t tell Simon that part, figuring it went without saying.

  “How do you feel about it, Ella?”

  I shrugged, and the subject went away for a minute.

  How do you feel things, Simon?

  We met at Norm’s Restaurant, the same one, on Vermont and Sunset. It was my idea. I thought I’d be comfortable there. Simon put me on the inside booth seat, by the window, and when he sat down, he blocked off my exit.

  She looked good, but she didn’t feel the same as she looked, the part I could feel across the table. Her hair was nicely combed and curly, and she wore makeup, put on correctly, and red lips, with white teeth showing behind when she smiled.

  I never said a word to her, but she kept smiling at me, asking Simon how we both were, and that’s when I realized it was coming across the table at me. It was the deepest sense of panic I could imagine, like in that movie The Blob, when it’s oozing at you, and you know it’ll take you over, smother you, eat you alive, but you can’t run away.

  “Simon, let me out,” I hissed in his ear.

  “What? Just a second—what’d you say, Mom?”

  “Simon, let me out!” Every head in the restaurant turned to look, even the line cooks.

  “She probably has to go to the bathroom, Simon. Let her out.”

  He jumped up and I squeezed past him and ran around the corner toward the restrooms, and kept going. It seemed my only remaining birthright. After all, the nice thing about being a horse is the minimum of options. No fight-or-flight choice involved. Just stretch those muscles, open up the heart and lungs, and don’t stop until it’s over. My heart was a horse heart. I’d never doubted that.

  I stopped at a phone a mile or so down Sunset and called Willie, and asked if she could come pick me up, right away. I couldn’t see, I could barely hear her voice on the phone, barely hear my own, and she had to come fast. If Simon and my mother came after me, I’d be a sitting duck. My mother might touch me before I ever saw her coming.

  Willie drove over to get me, and took me back to her house, where I asked if I could have a cup of hot chocolate.

  “Why did they take the moon away?” I said, maybe a few times, wondering why she didn’t answer, until I realized I couldn’t hear myself say it. She brought me a warm mug, but I had to feel for it, and I warmed my hands on it, blowing into it to send steam into my face. I took a big burning gulp but it didn’t help. The world stayed black and silent. I felt Willie’s hand on my shoulder. No other input from the world outside my head. What a place to be stuck.

  “I just realized,” I said, or I think I said, “that I came out of her body. And now I think I can save myself by keeping away from her. Don’t you see how much too late it is?”

  I couldn’t tell how loud I was talking, or even if I made a sound at all, but my throat came up strained.

  I asked Willie to take me outside into the grass, and she walked with me until I felt it under my shoes, and I fell into it, squeezing tufts between my fingers, knowing it was green from memory.

  I rolled around on my back, kicked my legs up in the air, trying to get the feel of it, trying to pretend my neck wasn’t too short, and two of my legs weren’t arms. I swung back to my feet but it was no use. It didn’t balance. It was put together all wrong. I could never be what I was meant to be, because the body was all wrong. Useless.

  Useless!

  I slammed up against the unyielding stucco of Willie’s house, as if I could shatter the worthless shell part of me. As if its obvious defects would run through it like a flaw, causing it to break apart on impact. But for something put together all wrong, it stood surprisingly strong. Willie grabbed me and held me and I knew then, in a sickening flash in my human gut, that I couldn’t please them and keep them at the same time, and so would have to disappoint them both.

  THE FACE OF SO MUCH CHANGE

  Everett’s wife is a coal-haired woman named May. She smiles a lot, talks hardly at all.

  She serves cornmeal cakes and beans, and canned peaches. After dinner Everett and I sit out in the dirt in front of his new house, Everett smoking and taking notice of constellations.

  I thank him for his hospitality. I want to explain the void it fills in me, how the smallest scrap of hospitality grows to cover vast needs, but it’s so much more than Everett would say. Some things, he teaches me with his silence, we must trust others to know.

  “How can you walk to the mesa? It’s almost fifty miles.”

  “I’ve already walked twice that far.”

  “And your feet and your spirit are still bruised from that. You should wait until you’re stronger.”

  “I can’t, Everett. I have to move on. I have to find Sam Roanhorse.”

  “Then you should let me drive you.”

  “Well, that just defeats the whole purpose then, Everett. I mean, drive me where? I don’t know where my brother Simon is. It’s when I get out there. When I just happen to cross a place he’s been. It’s something I figure out as I go. I can’t explain it, but it got me this far, right?”

  “Then all the more reason to wait. You need all your resources, not just your feet. You need to travel strong.”

  “I have to go.”

  I feel his disappointment, though he says nothing. I have turned away from spirit. Spirit says I should wait. Everything that knows and is right says I must wait. But I have put my brother Simon above this in my prioritizing, and, even as I am satisfied with that de
cision, I cannot answer the question of how it is right to place anything before the universe, or how it will benefit me. Or how it will benefit Simon, if there is a Simon.

  We sit quiet, and I mark the moment I must rise to go, but my legs seem to take exception to my thinking.

  In time we hear the hum of an engine and the crunch of wheels on Everett’s rocky dirt road.

  An old man with a face like a dried-apple doll jumps down from a one-ton flatbed truck. He walks to where we sit.

  Everett says to me, “Your big job has just become easier.”

  “Everett, I heard the news. Jake says you took your five best pigeons to be bred to the champions in Fort Defiance. Why don’t you ever tell me these things yourself? I’m never sure if you’re on my side or not.”

  “Because your birds are faster than mine already.” Everett offers the old man a hand-rolled cigarette. “Sam Roanhorse, Ella Ginsberg. Ella Ginsberg, Sam Roanhorse. Ella is wanting to speak with you.”

  Sam holds the picture for a cautious length of time, away from himself, into the light cast from Everett’s new home.

  “I can’t say this is the man I saw. But I can’t say for sure it’s not. His hair was yellow, like this, but longer. More tangled. And this man is soft and padded. The man I saw was gaunt, and had not only a mustache but a full beard, untrimmed. Still, if he had traveled far, these changes could happen. But how can I recognize for sure how a man might look in the face of so much change?”

  “Mr. Roanhorse, you say he walked north, toward the mesa?”

  “Yes, I watched him go. I wondered, does he feel the pain from those blisters of sunburn? What must his feet feel like? Due north to the mesa, without stopping, until he was out of sight.”

  “Did he say why he wanted the rifle?”

  Sam trades a look with Everett, and I know I have asked an unenlightened thing.

  “A man who sells rifles asks only if a buyer carries cash. Too many questions are bad for business.”

  “And he bought ammunition?”

  “Yes, a lot of it. A lot to carry. And a big knife. So, what are you going to do now? Will you go look for your brother at the mesa? It’s a long walk. In tourist season, when white people drive the roads to Monument Valley and to Canyon de Chelly, you could hitch a ride. Until then, it’s quiet. Maybe a Navajo will stop for you, but who knows? You could ride with me back to my store. It’s almost twenty miles of the distance.”