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

from the baler’s twine and rustled. Probably were superstitious, but pie pans had been Mother’s method.

I thought how Mave had raised me to be inward and pensive, but how I’d already been born heir to my mother’s haggard hunger for solitude. Seven to eight a.m. daily she listened to gospel radio preaching, soaked in it, glowed in it, grew caustic with it. I could feel it when I touched her, like a static shock. She listened in the kitchen alone for a hallowed hour. I could hear the show from the front room, where I’d sit by the hot water tank and watch her private soaking and understand her life to be sealed off from me.

I never understood how some people moved through time cover to cover, as if through evenly dispersed sections in the Sears Roebuck catalog—jeans, dresses, jackets, appliances—not rushing, not deviating, with portioned-out segments for school, work, love, marriage, children, grandchildren. It always seemed to me that time spiraled, taking you first one way then another so your thirty-five-year-old self might brush past your self as a teen, then as a prepubescent pulling a red wagon.

The foil pans skirmished with the breeze, and I was almost cold. I could easily be sixteen again in winter, and there was Mave coming over to my house without a coat to tell me a truck had hit black ice and killed my mother and father instantly. My teen self stood in the doorway, turned her young body all of a piece, as a bronze statue might be turned. Mave grabbed me so that when I fell I did not fall as hard. There was a constriction in my asthmatic throat like a net I could not disentangle—though I tried to do so with my fingernails, clearing the webbing, but it was my hair and face I was scraping, like a feral cat. She tried to restrain me, but I scraped at her too. Somewhere she found a paper bag for me to breathe into, then she found leather work gloves and put them on me, then I could only bat her and myself with worn leather and I sank to her, into her solid structure and squared bones. The weight of the gloves, which had formed to my dad’s large hands, finally made me go limp. My hands huge, oversized, throbbing, still.

I grew a distrust of time’s gracious linear movement then. Weeks afterward, my body responded with a kind of arrest. I stopped bleeding monthly, stopped speaking, I breathed shallowly. I grew a cyst on my wrist, a hard calcium deposit with all my uncertainty and bitterness concentrated there. I did not eat, or more truly, I ate but did not remember that I had eaten.

And of course what I told no one—not Mave, not Dillon or Clarissa who tried their best to accompany me—was that I knew I had caused it. The slight but fiery filament that ran through me had pulsed with that inherited longing for aloneness, like a prayer waiting to be answered.

That night I wore the gloves to bed. Mave lay on couch cushions on my upstairs bedroom floor, sharing my grief’s epicenter. She’d lost her sister, of course. So you don’t scratch out your eyes, she’d said. The gloves chapped my nose and eyelids when I wiped; they dulled my contact with the wall paneling, though I still reached out as if feeling around for a trapdoor that would open into some other part of time, but I was not able to detect the slight misalignment of the boards that signaled escape.

I could not remember the funeral, but I sharply remembered Rex’s fight with Mave about what to do with me. Both stood sentry on her porch, glaring and hurting. I watched, cold, through her screen door.

“Miranda’s got her hands full, but there’s room,” he said. I thought of Belinda and Tuffie, teens then, the lingering pleurisy, and the way the twins, even as older boys, glommed onto Miranda like bottom feeders.

“Frankie can stay where she is,” Mave said.

“Miranda and Margot—” Rex worked his thought slowly, like a seed from between his teeth. His shirt flecked with hay from feeding cattle, the debris of chores, his speech slow and uneasy, unfinished. There were things always felt toward Mave but not spoken. “They understood each other,” he said.

“The kid can stay in her house. I’ll look after her.” Mave’s hip to the porch post to brace herself. He nudged a broken lamp with his boot, scanned the hoarded litter. “She’s already raised,” Mave said. “She’s sixteen. She should stay in her own house, and I’ll sleep there until she can be on her own. And I’ll pay it off.”

“Not with that woman’s money,” he said sharply. There it was. There you were, Ruth. Invoked. Barred.

“Get off my goddamn porch,” she said.

“You’re unfit, Mave.” He did not look at her but out at the black trees.

“Get off my porch.”

“You’re a drunk. Child welfare will come. She can stay with us till she’s of age, then she can decide. She can’t stay here alone.”

“She’s not alone.” Mave kicked the busted shade of the lamp he’d been toeing around. Then her bristly lip was firm and inches from his face, his years of judgment crosshatching his skin like woven wire. “Let Frankie decide now,” she said and looked at me like a wild animal in a trap.

How could I not stay with her? How could I ever betray her?

So Mave became my legal guardian and watched over me from one house over, and when Rex refused to keep the wild grape and multiflora rose brush-hogged from the break in the fence as my dad had done, Mave paid someone to do it. To clear the artery so her blood could flow to me. The deal was that I’d keep going to Snyder’s Crossing with Rex and Miranda, but I quit soon enough, leaving Mave to fend off Miranda’s pleas.

At first, for about a month, Mave left me only for