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

tombs fogged in moonlight. I chose the tombs, in the dream. I chose the terrified swine. I woke up soaked on the kitchen floor, groping in the dark for the tea towel.

EVEN AFTER CLAY AND I HAD BEEN MARRIED A MONTH, the house still felt like Lottie’s. She cooked, I scrounged up a side as if bringing a dish to a potluck. Clay had positioned the cinderblocks at the four corners of the trailer lot behind the house but had gotten no further.

I woke early at the start of the second month and sat on the back steps in two flannel shirts, smoking furtively in the September chill—I rarely smoked around Clay. It’s not that he forbade it in or near the house, but it filmed my skin with a grime noticeable to me next to his clarified flesh. He seemed to me wholly rinsed in body and mind.

“Frankie,” he said once, on a walk toward town while I smoked, “do you like the house? Would you like a porcelain sink to replace Mom’s stainless steel?” And though I reeked always of astringent cleaners, it was his phrases, not mine, that were ruddy and scrubbed kind. I did not answer the first; to the second, I said the steel was fine and there was no use wasting a fine sink. We turned around at Matlick Feed and the motel that sat derelict. “We could paint the stairwell,” he said.

“But it’s fine,” I told him, “really,” tossed my cigarette to the feed store pavement, maybe trying to reduce the differences between us.

On the back steps, I studied the blocks that propped up nothing. I liked the semi-darkness of morning in which no one shuffled around—Clay had left already at five thirty, in State Road clothes that smelled of fuel and sun, and Lottie still slept in her recliner, which she migrated to in the middle of each night. Her head lay back against the spray of lace doily, and she held her long braid across her front by habit. Sometimes I now wonder whether you slept this way, Ruth—and how long your braid. Ellis formed a heap on the kitchen floor. When I started the truck, the hound appeared in alert silhouette at the window behind the couch, backlit by the lamp I’d left on.

I drove to my sparse house to harvest the butternut squash. Backed the Ford Ranger up to the garden with buckets loaded in the bed. The foil pans along the perimeter had worked up an artful patina in the weather, rustling in the scant breeze like a string of spirit charms. A dozen butternuts were ready on the vine—two for Mave, two for Clarissa, two for Lottie’s kitchen, and a half dozen for the LaFaber co-op trade. My house stood by, a dark gray witness. The taste of the coffee in the thermos I’d brought was different, the proportions for Lottie’s pot never quite right.

I drove back and chose the two most shapely squashes. In the kitchen, Ellis ambled over and flopped his ears back and forth in a fury as if to shake loose a bad thought. “Hey, Hound,” I said, “hey, Flop,” sensing the warmth of the house and stripping off the flannels down to my long-underwear layer. I held out a squash to him, and he put a thick paw on it. I scratched his ear and spoke the doggerel that came from the easy soft place, unpinched, and I labored with a dull peeler on the two squashes in the sink. Ellis yawned and watched and smelled—I imagined that, in one sniff, he could smell everything on my body I had tried to wash off, nicotine grime, urine not wiped clean from the hair, my sweat, the sandy soil. I scooped out the seeds for a baking sheet, oiled them, sorted out the viscous strings, and he sniffed all that too, then pressed into my dropped hand chalked with resin.

I’d trained myself on the whereabouts of spoons and knives. I chopped the squash in coarse pieces and set them to cook down later in a little water, found the brown sugar neatly labeled in Tupperware by the same hand that had written the wilted lettuce recipe card. I salted the seeds that would roast bronze in the oven, then slid to the floor by the hound’s head, which he put in my lap.

That first month, Clay and I had lain down each night on sheets that somehow still smelled of their plastic packaging. We had skipped the honeymoon, felt too old. His every movement was slight and gentle. Mostly I thought about how I’d fouled out each game as a girl, elbowing, egregiously forceful. Mostly I slept on my back, feeling that I should not sleep in my usual fetal clutch, as if that posture were selfish. He’d reached for me, tentatively, only a handful of times.

IT SEEMS IMPORTANT NOW, RUTH, to say more about Dillon, to try to understand what became of us. He’d just barely missed Vietnam, too young, but all he had ever really wanted was to fly fighter jets for the US Air Force. He didn’t have the eyes and wouldn’t wear glasses since he thought he could get back to twenty-twenty. All I wanted was to breathe inside his body, like a baby newt, breathing him through my skin. We were restless and rough; he matched me in roughness.

He was wearied by the years of foundry work at LaFaber, firing the bronze trophies, grave markers, nameplates. I was wearied by nothing, body on edge. I sensed continually the nightshades past prime, their juice seeking us like something homing in, and him pulsing like a varied thrush, with a black ring bib around his gold- orange neck I could bite, a nectarine, both of our bodies flinty and thin and drinking in the other. But at the core, he preserved a loneliness, like something kept out of reach on a shelf. He always wore his uncle’s