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

I wanted the hotspot preceding the full blister at the base of my ring finger wearing its new thin band.

I knew and understood myself in work; I could still smell the pungent squash vine from the morning hour. I was eager to handle bark and brush and, in that eagerness, the air grew familiar and good in the cab. We didn’t need to agree on rolling down the windows, despite the chill, we let the September wind wrap us, and the core pole in me that carried the surge up and down—to chest and neck—heated like a coil, like the engine as Clay shifted into fourth headed east on Hollow Road toward the edge of Rex and Miranda’s farm, where the good locust trees had fallen in a storm, the hard wood that burned almost as hot as coal, Clay said. Heat gathered in Clay’s hand upon my leg. Stew watched the world pass.

I felt stripped down to that radiating coil once we pulled in the tram road cockeyed and parked and spilled out to start the work. I left the gloves I had refused balled up on the vinyl seat, tied back my thick hair, shed the flannels, pushed up the sleeves of the long underwear shirt to carry the firewood bare-armed. I worked with speed and hum, each bending of my body alert to the scent of the saw’s two- cycle oil, the burn in the sawdust, the men’s awareness of me. Stew acquiesced to smoke silently with me as Clay cut, and when the saw shut off we all picked up and stacked the full cord in the bed. If the pieces were small, I took them in twos, and the knocking together of the locust sounded musical, like thick wind chimes, a deep tone in all that dense grain. My biceps tensed—I knew they watched—my forearms went taut, dust caught in the arm hair, and the surge centered and swelled in my abdomen, pelvis, upper thighs, a capacity opened up. My groin heated as I squatted in the duff for another piece.

We worked until the evening dew started to fall and we could feel it on our faces. I tasted cigarettes and the salted roasted seed bits working free from in between my teeth. When it was time, I said I’d drive. Clay took middle and I drove too fast, given the weight in the pickup’s bed, but Clay said nothing. At the house, I lumbered the truck a little off the road since Stew’s red pickup barred the way to the woodshed. He offered to move it and then help unload and stack.

“I’m tired,” I said. “Clay and I can manage it tomorrow.” No one got out, and there was the lingering question of supper and whether we should ask Stew to stay and not leave in his blazing beautiful truck, and I knew Lottie would have soupy meat ready for which my cooked-down squash would be a side, and she was surely adding a plate for him right at that moment, right before spooning a bit of broth over the dog’s dry food, which would melt Ellis to ecstasy. I blamed the sudden ringing in my head on the residual song of wood striking wood and I felt them looking leftward at my face’s profile in the cab, in the dying evening sun and the grim porch light. It was up to me, it was my call. My mouth felt wet and forceful.

“Good night, Stew,” I said, “we thank you.” And that was it.

Stew backed out his red truck with care, switched on his headlights, and took off. Clay and I walked toward the porch and I grabbed his wrist. “Not that way,” I said, “this way,” and tugged him toward the side door that led more directly to the dark stairwell, bypassed the kitchen golden with light and pot roast and starch and carrots. He stayed silent, simply followed, a mild large body, but I still turned and said, “Clay, shh,” finger to my lips. The wooden stairs barely groaned.

You might consider my force a subsided sea, Ruth, and my beckoning cruel, given my singularity and my obstinate apartness. Given that I did not love him and he knew it. But it seems important to me now to speak to this, too, this day with him that was not nothing. I untied my black hair so it hung like drapery and I did not bother to pull the comforter down to the stiff sheets. I lay back. He said something about a shower, he smelled of One Shot chainsaw oil, I said no, it was okay. He said, “Now? I mean—” and I palmed the skin of his back beneath his shirt and felt it contract at my touch then sigh down like a released breath, or pant, his skin panting, his strong living back. He said again he should clean up first, but I helped him find my ragged shirt hem, my stomach, my bra wet with sweat. I pictured the woods and the stand of alder and locust flaring, I let myself picture Stew, even Dillon, for only a moment, all eyes squinting to see me. Clay hesitated and hovered. My inner surge soaked a cavern in me that wanted rough entrance, that wanted everything. Always everything, I could hear myself almost hollering for it. I said, “Just undo my belt.”

THE WHITE OF NAN’S EYE WITHIN THE PURPLE BRUISE, THAT CENTER of midnight poppy, began to hurt me every time I looked at her. Her body took on meaning. Part of that meaning was her witness to what my Dillon had become; the dark clouds I’d seen gathering before he left me behind unleashed their full fury of storm upon this, her body. Her twenty-some years of life seemed to swell.

Now, with your presence in the air of the car, Ruth, the girl went thoughtful, mulling things over. She regarded Mave with sorrow and intrigue, and with me she