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

only that our lives lived in the damp black of the bog and within the tiresome outlines of ridge and alfalfa had always felt like lives haunted. And maybe Nan, too, had felt haunted as she’d sought out lovers, dodged my once-sweet Dillion’s fist, and painted things with her homemade paints and her aerosol.

Mave’s cells rearranged, and the pain and constriction ebbed. She was asleep before I pulled back onto the highway.

I WROTE YOU WHEN I WAS A CHILD, RUTH, BECAUSE YOU HEARD MY MIND. Since I never heard your actual speaking voice, I imagined you talking inside my head with the scratchy sound of a sad record, then I’d sit down to pad and paper thinking thoughts I would not have otherwise thought.

Once, as a kid, I used Clarissa’s nail polish brush to draw my own invented hieroglyph on a clay jar. What does it say? I asked Mave—this was around the time she had come home for good. She studied it. A false star, she said. A false promise of dawn. No, a shirt on a clothesline. Or a wolf in blurred motion—see its long snout and running legs? She set it on her sill. She’d cropped off her hair. I brought the ceramic figurines from the box of Red Rose tea bags—a monkey and a sheep—and put them, and other things, in the jar for her because I understood she was lonely. At that time, I began to write you only in my head and I thought about the heartbeat of the named world, which you’d written to me about, but I no longer had your letters to reread.

ON SUNDAY EVENING, AFTER CLAY HAD ANNOUNCED our engagement at Snyder’s Crossing, I returned to Lottie’s kitchen. Shoes off, I felt Ellis’s warm place on the rug by the woodstove. He’d lain there until he’d reoriented to the pool of sun by the smoky box of parsley. His stomach was a mound. He dreamed a vivid brutish dream and sounded fluffs of bark, and I bent to touch him.

Clay had cut three yellow dahlias from somewhere and stuck them in a wide-mouthed jar which gave them great leeway. As I’d walked up the driveway, I’d noted the red, white, and blue pinwheels stuck in the yard, snug to the yew bush, but it was May so they must have been left over from the last July Fourth. I could sense the inertia. They did not wheel around in the breezeless air. I knew he’d announced our engagement as he strummed the guitar and sang praise through the small amp with the backing of the gospel band, including lean and impenetrable Stew on bass, thinking who knows what about the news. My phone had rung all afternoon, but I had not picked up. It would be Miranda and the cousins—Belinda, Tuffie.

He wore a Sunday dress shirt and seemed nervous that I’d change my mind. He sat.

“I have some conditions,” I said, and he said okay, what are they.

“I want to marry you on an old garden plot at Rex and Miranda’s.”

Relief puffed his lips. “Okay.”

“They used to grow potatoes there, but it’s grass now, and flat and pretty for an outdoor wedding. And I don’t want to wear a white dress.”

“Whatever you want.”

“And I want to keep my house in my name.”

The hound rotated his moon-mound belly, flapped an ear, and Clay shifted his attention there. How much warmth did he truly have for me? I saw the blush of throat before I heard the agitation in his voice. Uncustomary, didn’t I think? I suspected he’d planned to sell my house to pay for his mother’s trailer. I told him I’d need a place for the co-op women to meet, and he searched me, carefully, as he often did, as if to mine my cold mind. It had all been riddled with kindness and courtesy, from the first time he’d taken me to the Dairy Delite.

“Couldn’t the women meet here?”

“You’ll have band practice here.”

“Just on Saturday nights.”

“The women can get rowdy. There’s a good bit of drinking you won’t like. And I’d rather you and I have privacy.” I stood backed up against the stove, and I knew I should sit with him, put my hands on the table where he could see them as empty and open and harmless. “I will live here with you, Clay, but I want to keep my house.”

Inside my skull I pictured myself his wife. The parsley-smoked air that existed between us, two people in one room, seemed vast and obscuring. I sensed he and I would not cross certain membranes and boundary lines. Clay said okay. He stood and bent to scratch Ellis’s ears with rough tenderness and the dog splayed beneath it. I slipped my shoes back on. It was a kiss goodbye he wanted. I went to him, kissed him on the cheek where the throat’s flush had faintly spread.

“And I want Aunt Mave to give me away.”

“Should be your Uncle Rex, since your father’s passed.”

“Maybe so.”

He gave me the jar of dahlias. I couldn’t tell whether I excited him or not, whether he might excite me. Against the house’s soft rustling colors, the eggshell white of the kitchen walls lined with the redundant bonneted girl, I felt like a harsh discordant color. The screen door would shut several beats after I walked through it, with the slow measured closure of a hydraulic.

I DID NOT DRIVE HOME. I drove the two miles past my turnoff to Rex and Miranda’s truck patch that sat far enough from their farmhouse for me to keep out of their sight. On the west side of the half-acre garden already vining with peas and rimmed in a perimeter of unblooming zinnias lay the old garden plot. Now fallow, this was the plot where I’d dug potatoes with my cousins—the twin boys, Ron and Benji, and Belinda and Tuffie—when Aunt Miranda still complained of a mild chronic pleurisy. Every time she lifted a