Call It Horses by Jessie Eerden (the reading list .TXT) 📕

It took years of shadows moving, growing dense. In my twenties something changed abruptly. Like a skin sack of wine breaking. Mother and Dad were nearly nine years dead by then, and I had also read most of your books by then, Ruth, in my house by Mave’s house, she and I installed in our specific patterns of solitude. Dillon and I had both quit the Baptists, he first. He let his grandmother whom he lived with sit the pew alone. He did not tell me why. And we’d both quit school and worked at the plant. Dillon was still a boy at twenty-three and I still boyish at twenty-five.

We walked one day without talking and stood still at the fence at the far end of Uncle Rex’s Guernsey pasture. I was after wild lilies to uproot and replant. I had a trowel in one hand and pulled up a loosened horde of orange lilies with the other. When I stood, I found him pressed up behind me, still silent, as was I. My jeans gapped enough in front to sag loose, I made my stomach concave, and he palmed me there then slid slowly down, crossed my chest with his other arm like a brace. I dropped the tool but not the lilies. Without noise, without meeting eyes, we threaded expertly through the barbed wire fence and headed to where Heather Run pooled into a brief pond, then walked still further. We went quickly on to the hidden source of the creek, the underground spring giving way to swamp. We stopped in a standing wrestle and crush of lilies, kissed roughly and with such latent hunger against a broad tree, fumbled then through the woods homing to the small mouth of the Train Cave. Did we not seek the swallow of it? We ducked in and felt though could not see its great inner expanse until, somewhere, it narrowed to nests and low tunnels deeper in. He wore his Army jacket, I felt him take it off and lay it on the stone and tamped dirt. There were bats, I felt their brush with my bare back, then his jacket lining against my bare back, the uneven ground beneath. In the smell of white-dark limestone and the wet of petrified drip-down stalactites, his familiar mouth took me in and uttered me. His hips and belly and all of him taut, he arched, and then a blur at our boundaries’ edges, he and I wrung into the same person with four arms and four legs. We lay heaving.

And afterward, there was an awful quiet. My mirror self—a boy in that old surplus-store jacket and in undershirts that I wore that he wore, and temples that throbbed thoughts to me—afterward, wet, were we not as close as two people ever get? Yet I put my hot hand on his chest, and the breastbone that rose and fell fast was his. It was his alone. My second self obscured. This was when we split apart.

IT WAS LATE ON THE S ATURDAY OF THE PANCAKES and Liza’s letter when I called Mave. She was bitter about the hour and groggy. Said she’d dreamed of blue horses. Said, “The nicotine patch isn’t working, but it keeps things interesting.” She knew Clay had staged the betrothal breakfast date but didn’t ask about it. I told her about Liza. She was sorry to hear it and did remember her as the girl who came with her mother to bring weekly casseroles after my parents’ death.

“The Tupperware was all labeled,” she said. “Even the lids.”

“That’s her.” I stood in my kitchen winding the stretched-out phone cord around my hand. The phone line ticked as if the connection were long distance and not across the fence.

“I was going to tell you in the morning,” I said. “Are you sober?”

“That’s a matter of opinion.”

“Will you give me away?”

A pause. “You should have seen those horses run. There was a blue palomino, I think.”

“At the wedding, Mave.”

Ticking of the line. I heard the night sounds outside her window that were my night sounds. The summer peepers and insect trills that spill into your skull and make your mind’s action subside, let all language and thought froth down and down.

“I NEED SOME NEW CLOTHES,” SAID NAN AT THE SIGNS FOR SUTTON.

“You hear me, Frankie?”

I had not yet mustered the strength to address the scamp directly. I studied the skin divots under her collar bone in my mirror, the faint lip liner applied in her other life. A black bra strap peeked from her dress. She was ten years younger than I. Even with the black eye and that crazy hair, she was indisputably beautiful.

“I only had time to pack a couple things.” Peevish, delicate face. I wondered what it was she was after.

Scraggly vetch purpled the highway median, and I knew my cold shoulder toward Nan was cruel and undeserved. Also, I could sense, working up in Mave then, a swarm of inner black flies—what she called the wheezing and coughing that overtook her in those days, fits at their own appointed time. “The flies bite on the inside,” she’d say.

“We can stop there,” said Mave, pointing to the billboard for Antiques & Primitives. “All you’ll need is a loin cloth and sea shells. Frankie, note that attire in the book.”

“Listen,” Nan said, “this is my car and we have a long way to go, so maybe you can speak civil.”

“I mean no harm, Gypsy Moth,” whispered Mave with scanter air.

“Are you going to talk to me, Frankie, or just let the crazy answer?” Nan leaned forward to poke her head above the console, its cup holder full of Mave’s red candy from the Exxon. “All the way to Arizona, you’re not going to speak to me.”

“Abiquiuú’s in New Mexico,” said Mave.

“Wherever. It’s my car.”

“It’s your bully husband’s car,” said Mave. “It’s our joyride, and you were not exactly invited.”

Nan muttered something. Flung herself back, and I heard