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

We hadn’t even made it out of West Virginia. There were at least thirty road hours ahead. Mave’s Pontiac had blown months before, my pickup had gone dead that morning. We’d packed the truck, intending to swing by Clarissa’s to say goodbye and give her the tub of squash from Miranda. I’d turned the key in the faithful black Ford Ranger I’d bought off Rex—nothing.

Then, unbelievably, out of nowhere came Nan in Dillon’s blue Oldsmobile, and why? I didn’t know. Maybe because I ran the women’s co-op, and she’d turned up there at our most recent gathering, early that September of 1990, looking like she held something bloody. I remembered that first encounter with her so vividly—she’d appeared at my kitchen door with that wild hair and a hand at her front, looking hugely pregnant. The other women congregated in the living room, and I met her at the door.

“Is this the get-together?” she said through the screen and opened the door boldly, forced it past where it caught on the porch floor, and stepped inside into full exposure. She was starkly pretty, though thin in the face with heavy lipstick and eye shadow, younger than I by several years, that great mound of hair, not pregnant after all but her front bulged. I saw a dark bruise at the front of her neck. She wore a green Army jacket too large for her. She held her house dress folded up in front of her, gathered at the hem to make a kind of sack, the dress a light pastel yellow. A black slip showed in front, satiny to her knees, and lovely legs below ending in black ballet shoes. Through the dress-sack, bright red streaks bled. Because of where and how she held her bulk, I was afraid she held a dead baby. I stared. She hefted, struggled toward the slab table in the kitchen. “My god,” I said.

“Thought maybe I could join you all?” She made it to the table and released her load. Large topped and scrubbed beets rolled onto the surface, a dozen or more. Some fell to the floor and she laughed. “I have these to trade. You trade things at a co-op, right?” A curvy sliver of a woman with a bloodied yellow dress. “I’m Nan,” she said. No care for ruining the fabric with stain.

Army jacket, loose-legged, and that hair. I had known, though she’d not said, that she was Dillon’s wife.

“Looks like you got beer?” she’d said, hopeful.

But maybe, that October morning of the stalled-out truck and foiled plans, she’d driven to my house because she was hated by every woman in town since she flirted with their husbands, since she strode around in short dresses, since she’d been caught with the football coach in the high school locker room. But Dillon had beaten her before the coach fiasco; I’d seen her bruises. She found us sitting there defeated—Mave strung with tubing and me with an ice floe caught in my ribcage.

“Help me, my god, he will kill me,” Nan said.

Because she was starved for something unnamed. Or, most simply, she’d driven to my house because she had nowhere else to go, and she was on this trip because she had a running vehicle.

“Tell her I’m driving,” I’d said to Mave, and we’d piled in.

“Georgia O’Keeffe lived in Abiquiú,” Mave said. “The painter. She wasn’t from there. Sometimes you recognize yourself in a place you’ve never seen before. O’Keeffe said that.”

I watched Nan watch the window glass and maybe all else blowing by, the exit for antiques and primitives, the skinny trees. Her eye ringed in bruise seemed to shine at the mention of O’Keeffe. I had seen Nan’s drawings, the dirty ones but also the artful ones she showed no one.

Mave went pensive and deserted and professorial, as she often did, and said, “O’Keeffe woke early and immediately started painting. She went at it all day, ate a few things, little mealy squirrels on sticks, a few locusts, some honey. She slept in an old car so she could listen to the red rocks at night. She worked first thing in the morning because once you wait, the moment is gone. After dawn, half the day has passed you by, Little Gypsy Moth Head. You have to beat the morning glories that never seem real.” Mave took a breath, two, three. “I think she worked sometimes without a shirt. Just brown my body and leave me in peace with ochre and blue.”

Then Mave was no longer speaking. She drilled her head into her head rest, gripped her thighs, her body one long fist. She gasped and coughed hard, a full-on fit.

“It’ll pass, it’ll pass,” I said, signaling to pull over.

She wheezed and hacked, and thick yellow spit—not black flies—flecked the dash.

I pulled off to the shoulder, skidded in the gravel, there was a tumble of hound. “Hey.” I was in her face, but she clenched her eyes. “Are you taking what you’re supposed to? Where’s your sack?”

She got a single good breath down, calmed, coughed once more.

“I said where’s your sack?”

“Give me a codeine,” she said.

“Did you take the fluid pill? And the steroid?”

“I flushed everything but the codeine.”

“Dammit,” I said. I got out, circled to her side, and dug frantically in her brown bag in the door’s lower cup holder for the pain pills. She took them with Pepsi, leaned back on the headrest, stricken head all skull, as if flesh could sometimes be an illusion. There was no way they could work that fast but she gave in at the swallow, unfisted down into the seat. I realized Nan stood beside me on the shoulder only when I felt the bird take my wrist. Her wild hair took a hit from a semi slamming past. I said nothing.

Ruth, it was clear that Mave’s time was running out. And clear we were running. From what specter, I did not know then. I knew