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

child, pain—something torn loose from her lung, she said. And even when her kids were ten, twelve, fifteen, she maintained that spinal curve, as if sheltering herself. The old milkhouse, rendered obsolete long ago by the refrigerator, hunkered on the far side of the plot in a dip in the land. The stream that branched off Heather Run flowed through low slits in the walls and over the building’s concrete foundation to keep things cool. A defunct structure impractical even before the dawn of the Frigidaire because it sat too far from the house. Rex had always used it for tools.

It was not lost on me that Miranda had had four kids at my age, hefting them and feeling each heft in the lung. I straightened my shoulders and walked the length of the cultivated patch toward the fallow one. A dead crow Rex had shot hung on a pole to warn the survivors away from the planted seed corn. Carnage for crows and electric fencing for deer, no strung-together foil pie pans around the border like I used to deter them. He called the pans superstitious. I squatted down at the corner where the worked-up garden met the resting plot, its scars grown over with crabgrass.

As children, we had halved the seed potatoes with paring knives, planted them in straight-enough rows. We took hoes to hill up the vines and shield the crop from sun poisoning, then we let the vines shrivel into early fall, dug the new potatoes in October. We followed behind Rex’s tractor to stuff the cool Kennebecs in our sacks. I remember once, as I stood with my sack opposite Ron—the feebler of the twins, with rail-thin arms and dreamy, distracted eyes—we watched the tractor’s plow force the tubers to the sun along with little balls of mice babies Rex did not mean to kill.

“L-look,” stuttered Ron. “No, no, no,” he whispered with no stammer, for he did not stammer when he whispered, and he knifed his bare knees into the furrow to gather each mouse into his bag, his brother Benji grubbing Kennebecs without a word, always blanching at Ron’s tenderness.

Over in the wet, the seepage and the spring, all that green and softness, the bathtub cattle trough still sputtered with overflow, though thick with algae. It watered the Guernseys that stood still as a painting, watching me. Only their great stomachs moved, so slightly, with breath. One flittered an ear at a fly. I crossed in a diagonal to the edge of the clawfoot trough. I loved its cool variegated greens. I culled the algae from the other weed. I remembered the blade dragged, the earth smell, the balls of mice rolling out of the dirt, some still wriggling in the palm of my boy cousin. Some that Ron missed would be prey for hawks, or covered again to break down to whispers of bones bearing witness to the hurt we don’t intend.

“WHAT’S WITH THE FAKE FLOWERS?” Mave asked.

“They’re dahlias.”

“They’re too yellow, god.” She set them on a TV tray far across her living room.

“What do you think you’ll wear on my big day?” I was glad to see her dressed and cognizant and limber. I watched her move the offensive flowers further out to the hallway. She wore her steel toe boots untied. Her buttocks were square under her jeans and flat as if she’d sat on a slab of wood for too long. I wondered so often, Ruth, whether you had found her beautiful.

“This.” She flayed out the front ends of her unbuttoned denim shirt, white V-neck underneath. Gravel eyes, upper lip fur, face stony and rarified. “So he said okay? Wonder if he’ll ask me for your hand.”

“He spoke to Rex apparently.”

“Wonder what I would have said.”

We settled onto the plastic pads of the kitchen chairs turned living room chairs. At one time she’d contained the spilling-out padding with strips of contact paper with signs printed all over it, for a joke: Home Sweet Home, Backdoor Friends Are Best, Laugh Often. She’d wrapped the chair backs too and the sticky paper was peeling free. The old adhesive snagged my hair when I shifted my elbows down to my knees as if sitting the bench during a game. I studied the huge dahlias from a distance. They did look fake.

She said the only one people look at is the one in white.

“I’ll wear yellow, I think.”

“Renegade.”

One of the papered-over chairs held a stack of your books on Modernist art and a moldy Shop ’n Save circular. I told her Rex and Miranda already had peas up and seed corn in, the first errant hungry crow shot and hung as example.

“You want to watch Ancient Worlds at nine?”

“No, I’ll go.”

“Miranda called and said he announced it at church.”

“Yeah. I got to go.” My eyes itched.

“You don’t want to know what else she said?”

I was thirsty, but we drank nothing.

“She thinks you’ll be happy in time. I’m pretty sure my sister’s never spent a day of her life alone.” Mave scruffed her short hair. “You on the other hand. And me.” She looked in the direction of my house as though she could see, through the wall, the gap in the fence I’d traversed nearly every day of my life. “Some varieties of unrest are too potent for something like marriage to resolve. There’ll be wild onions in the cake. You writing?”

“I have nothing in me to write.”

“Sure you do. Just inhabit your former life, all your lives, including this one here in my shitbox house, on behalf of us all.”

My life, former and present and yet to come—was it not decidedly small? I left, walked into night air warm enough to dampen my T-shirt’s underarms. I crossed back toward my house and surveyed my garden, a couple of weeks behind Rex’s. At the periphery, the moonlight hit the pie pans strung there to say to the deer, Don’t hound us, don’t mess with the seedlings. I liked the way they dangled