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

her school bus run and slept in my parents’ bed. When I could hear the bus she kept parked by her house shift into gear before dawn, I felt held by the pocket of solitude she’d somehow sewn around me. She let me stay home from school at first. In the morning, seven to eight a.m., I rose and slipped into Mother’s skin, during her gospel radio hour. I would not turn on the radio, but I held her Bible with The Living Word on its cover. At eight, I slipped out of it, hanging up her skin as if it were an apron on a hook, and waited for Mave to cook me oats.

You can surmise, Ruth, that she was not affectionate with me. But she was watchful. She was less mother and more loyal stray dog. She sent up signs of assurance in her own way, as if in semaphore. Once, in a warm spell that winter, she pulled up in her long cavernous school bus, emptied of kids, parked, and looked over to me through the fence break and waved. This was our new world. It felt like an old world. I held the Bible shut in my lap on the front porch steps, since it was not yet eight. She went into her house, and I watched her front door flanked with porch rubble. I regretted then not going with Rex, or not asking my friend Liza if her mother would let me stay in their clean attic room. The lattice crisscrossed my porch floor with shadows like prison bars.

After a while, Mave came back outside with a wicker basket of wet laundry hefted onto her hip and walked toward her single green clothesline wire she never used, in the stilted way you walk when you carry real weight. She hung her manshirts by the tails, or by the shoulders, indiscriminate, her jeans by the waist with their pockets pulled out like tongues. The nylon line sagged between its eyehooks screwed to walnut tree and shed wall, with the weight of socks, linen towel, T-shirt. I am here, she was saying, in the best way she could.

Plenty of times she came over and held up my life like a cedar beam. Plenty of times she dragged me into her cluttered living room for PBS. But that day she had hung her laundry for a sign. And I understood.

OUR WEDDING WAS IN AUGUST OF 1989. It fell when the early corn was already in pint Ziplocs in the freezer and the late corn in tassel. I’d started the sauerkraut on its six months of fermentation in the crock in the basement of my house, now semi-barren but still in my name. The musk melons were close, the onions hung, the August prematurely cool. I made my own bouquet, wrapped a hair ribbon around the woody stems of three bluing hydrangeas.

Yellow dress, hair braided back in a way I never wore it, my body in its boyish, lean obstinacy. Since Mave would know where to find me at eleven, I left two hours early and parked my Ford Ranger in the place Rex had ribboned off for everyone, having diverted his herd. I walked past the garden now fully hedged with zinnias, magenta and orange and red, and thick with the smell of ripe tomatoes and their powerful vines, all the spines of the pole beans so loaded. No heartbeat in the electric fence disconnected from the battery. I could not help but miss the gentle Guernseys and I could tell from some distance away that the bathtub trough was spotless now, that someone, probably Aunt Miranda, had bleached it for me, and the thousand shades of green were now a singular metal white.

The milkhouse I loved sat hushed in its uselessness. I lifted the latch and descended two levels of bowed stairs to the cement slabs still cooled by the natural spring. It could still have kept jugs of milk for a day or two. Bare boards dangled from chains hooked to the ceiling beams where someone, prefiguring Miranda, had kept preserves.

Back up the stairs one level was the small workbench Rex hadn’t used in years. To the underside of the upper shelf he had nailed canning jar lids and rings and screwed on jars filled with bolts, nuts, staples, seeds, the teeth of some mechanical thing, all of it now rusted out. The light from the high windows hit the jars. I realized I’d left the hydrangeas on the cab’s bench seat. I fingered my braid. I would maybe stay in the milkhouse and skip the whole thing.

The workbench presented a desk, sandpaper scraps lying coarse side down, and on the smooth side, between the stamps of the brand name, I could have written a little series of letters to you—just a few lines each—but I had no pen. In the corner sat a shapely stone jar. Terracotta, a tiny cistern perhaps, shaped by a people who knew how to work the mud. It was plain, and if I’d had a brush, or nail polish, I’d have tried to paint it with birds and bats and stars and real dahlias. I no longer remembered the few hieroglyphs you’d taught me. Since I could not sit anywhere without dirtying the dress, I stood stiffly waiting.

I touched my hair again and thought briefly of my mother. Her exacting hands braiding my young-girl hair, pulling tight at my temples, her belittling gaze which, I knew, was truly a look of bafflement. After a while, up at ground level: distant sounds of vehicles parking. I pictured the bodies sitting down on folding chairs, each row set off by a single downturned gladiola, Clarissa’s touch.

Clarissa in a blue dress with capped sleeves and her honey bangs curled with a curling iron by her twenty-year-old daughter Tess, and Clarissa’s Darrell begrudging the interruption to the alfalfa’s final cutting, possessive arm stretched atop her chair back. Miranda in sage-green cotton matching Rex’s