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

“God, he did a number on you,” said Mave.

Nan said nothing audible.

I pictured upon the windshield the squint of Dillon’s dim eyes, his longing to fly jets, stealth bombers, and how he’d braided yarn into my black hair as if a little boy though he hadn’t been a little boy then. But we had been young, pliable. This was now the detailed work of my Dillon—Nan’s arms of bruises, Nan his wife.

“By what star do you guide your life, Nannette?” asked Mave, slipping the cotton ball out from under the oxygen tubing above her ear to scratch.

“By what?”

“It’s okay, you don’t have to talk. Lewd little beast.”

I said, “Mave. Stop.” But I didn’t mean it.

“He called me a little whore,” Nan said very small.

“We should make nametags,” Mave said.

“That’s enough,” I said.

“Little Whore, Little Gypsy Moth Hair. In your little apricot shift.” She replaced the yellow cotton ball.

I heard Ellis shake his floppy ears to get a flea out, then settle, probably with his chin on Nan’s sumptuous leg. Ellis was my husband’s dog but somehow his dense houndbody had found itself in the blue car. There were smudges of nose and tongue on the right-side window of the backseat. I’ll bring him back, Clay, I’d said to myself.

“Give us the right names in your book,” Mave said to me.

“There is no book,” I said.

“What book?” asked Nan.

It was 1990. October. The Saturday world outside of Nan’s rusty Olds, which was really Dillon’s rusty Olds, was all gray dawn and asphalt and trees thinning then thickening back up just when I started to breathe. None of us had ever seen the desert. When Nan drifted off and flattened her hair against the window, I studied her in the other mirror.

“Still jealous?” Mave asked me. “You could’ve been his punching bag. You dodged a bullet, as they say.” Nan’s pretty lips parted in her sleep.

I admit to you, Ruth, the word jealous didn’t touch the hem. I wanted to carve out her stomach and insert myself up through her skeletal system. Rip out her spine like a brittle fish’s, and as I did so, it would sound as though I were running a stick over a xylophone.

“Not really,” I said.

Was it her loveliness that stung me, in comparison with my weighted hair and dark gaunt face? No, I think it was her forthrightness, her ease. I understood her to be hurt and groping after something—that I understood—but not her ease.

Some time passed, or it didn’t pass. Instead time swelled Mave’s lungs, squeezing out the rightful air, her death imminent even from the start, though I wouldn’t admit it. Some silence fell. Time and silence were the big actors now, calling all the shots. When we were about twenty miles out of Caudell, West Virginia on 119 South, away from the smell of swamp and green and the baled alfalfa, Nan roused and wiped her mouth.

The first time I’d ever seen this girl, I mistakenly thought she’d held a dead baby, and I unmistakenly thought she was starved and stuck.

“Are we ever going back?” Nan asked, as though she had been dreaming about where she’d unpack her suitcase of silk things, her one spare dress, her makeup and her filthy pictures, and, beneath those pictures, her secret beautiful ones. “Or are we going to stay out there?”

Nobody answered.

MAVE TOLD ME ONCE I NEEDED TO WRITE A BOOK, and I said, “Beginning where?”

“At the beginning, Frankie,” she said.

“The beginning of what?”

“Time.”

We cracked up.

“Start when we slimed out of the sea,” she said. “Or in your hopeless cosmology, when the god-turtle surfaced and somebody said, ‘Let there be a city on top of her great shell.’” Mave’s strong lips somehow like a vise, as if when opened, there would be mercy, reprieve. But more often, there was brusqueness. More often than that, obfuscation.

“Begin before words begin,” she said. “Write the chaos and the anthem.” She told me I only had to create something to come back to. Get a little traction, hang a little meat out there for myself. Then go mop my many floors with Murphy Oil Soap and do something with my heavy drapery of hair, then come back to it. She wanted me to write it for her, maybe because she’d given up on her own work years before.

I once wrote you sheaves, Ruth. I wrote letters to say everything, and sometimes to not say anything but only to shape the day with my hands, to make sure it happened, as surely as the scuff on the porch floor when I pulled the screen door open. For a brief time, I wrote you daily in my sprawling child hand. When I received your letters about the life inside words, about hieroglyphs of peregrine and bread, about flowers, you rendered back to me myself in a more whole form, which I saw the way an animal sees water up ahead, through the trees. I am unable to write a book for Mave. I can only write to you, about her: the chaos and the anthem.

Why did she and Nan and I load into the beat-up blue car and head west that October in 1990? I’ll go back about a year and a half before that, to a night in early spring, 1989, to say what happened. Beginning in the fertile dark of Mave’s dining room—your Mave, your love and one-time student, and my Mave, my aunt and guardian. Here, nameless, fusty cells divided in a Petri dish of dark. Begin before words.

That spring night, I walked from my house to Mave’s through our break in the fence to retrieve her from where she sat on the unmopped dining room floor with no lights on. The overhead was burnt out. I picked over cardboard and books by feel and found a sweater to pull over her foul sleepshirt. She went all deadweight, exaggerated, and let me strongarm her to the concrete slab of front porch