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

Then you died, without my ever having met you.

Mave came home, with the money and books you left her, and moved back into her falling-down house where she and Mother and Miranda had all grown up. She carried all those hundreds of books in pillowcase sacks, one by one from the car, like heavy litters of kittens to be drowned. She had no bookshelves so she used bricks and plywood and two-by-fours. Shelves leaning and bowing, a sorry shrine. I was fourteen. I had sent a few letters that you had not answered and these Mave brought to me tied together in a bundle and unopened, and Mother saw and questioned until Mave confessed I’d been corresponding with you. Mother demanded those unopened letters and all the others I had from you, so I gave her the box of blue letters and she burned them in the fireplace—why didn’t I save some of them? Why didn’t I fight her? Maybe because Mave didn’t fight. She simply squatted in her boots and watched the fire and drank whiskey from a jar and accepted the reproach. Mave passed her hand through her coarse cut hair, so short. I wanted to touch it and was surprised that I did so. With my hand on her head, we mourned you.

“Why did you come back,” I whispered, “and not stay in the house on Aldrich Street? Wasn’t it a beautiful house? And so full of her?” I had no pictures of your house, but still I saw the oak bookshelves, the tall windows with green drapes, the hung hieroglyphs on parchment and reed. It was as if Mave’s face were a scrim lit from behind by your beautiful life.

Mave didn’t answer. After a while, toward the flaky ash in the grate, she said, “You keep writing. Write a book. She believed you could.”

I remember in one letter, Ruth, you told me to cut flowers daily. You said, They don’t have to be yours. Ownership is illusion. Make a vase by hand, change them out when they wilt the least bit, the prolific peonies, the daisies, but they don’t even have to be blooming. They can be stems. They can be twigs. They don’t even have to be real. They can be scribbled down.

When Mave came home widowed, it was late winter, too early for anything to bloom, but buds were out. On her dining room table, I cleared the already-collecting debris of bread crusts and loose mail and candy wrappers and set out a jar of green wood branches I’d twisted off a tree. They stuck out, helpless, in all directions. Some days after that I brought a clutch of fragrant waking-up alfalfa grass. Later on, a wild lily or a primrose I’d steal from Miranda. Later on, dandelions half gone to seed.

Dear Ruth.

I HAD A DREAM, THE NIGHT AFTER MY FIRST SEX WITH DlLLON ON THE WET FLOOR OF THE TRAIN CAVE. Since I was twenty-five with his twenty-three-year-old body now folded into mine but already wresting itself free, I felt uncontainable by my childhood room. I lay on the kitchen floor alone, still dressed in filthy jeans smelling of sulfur and duckweed. From my vantage point, lying on my back, the hanging tea towel billowed from another world. I felt my shoulder blades resist the linoleum and I studied my hands in the dark, lit by my animal light and etched by the Clorox and Murphy Oil that always leached through my surgical gloves at LaFaber. Then I slept.

I dreamed Miranda took me to a revival meeting at Snyder’s Crossing. The evangelist like a tree trunk, his Bible held intact with black electrical tape. He opened to the story of the demon-possessed man who lived naked in the tombs and caves. I was younger in the dream, in a sheer blouse, with no bra, with two rose-eyes seeking Dillon among the congregants, but he wasn’t there. Only a blur of faithful faces. The preacher took up most of the space, as if hogging a camera frame, and read me the story. Jesus sailed to the country of the Gadarenes, across from Galilee, and the naked crazy man housed nightly in cold stone ran to him and said with the voice of the spirits, What do we have to do with you, do not torment us. The revival preacher grew loud—It was Legion speaking, he said, it was a host of demons that seized up the man, made him cut his arms and break his chains and stay outside in sun and rain. Legion begged Jesus, Don’t send us into darkness, send us instead into that herd of swine. So Jesus cast them into the two thousand swine nearby and they whinnied, terrified, and flung themselves one by one off the cliff into the sea and drowned.

The preacher steamed and swaggered. He said the possessed man came into his right mind, his eyes became a new blue, and Jesus boarded the boat and left. What did it feel like for the man now free? the preacher asked me directly. My girl self said I didn’t know, then the evangelist shape-shifted into the man shed of demons. He had scarred arms, years of ratty hair full of dead things, blinking his eyes at all the colors now too bright. He was a lonely loon watching Jesus become a dot on the far water, and he said to me, I do not want a real bed. I do not want what I am supposed to want.

And the swine? Squealing, barreling their thick wire-hide bodies off the cliff—what did it feel like when the demons slipped into their fatty tissue and bones? Like a tongue, slithery, sensual? Like a tongue. The radiant lonely man loomed in hazy dream-light, in his neat house with a roof and ordered days. The swine with haggard flat faces were gone in a wild morbid parade.

I strayed into the man’s former caves that were tall enough for a train, the