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

PBS, and I’d found a book of prints afterward on her shelves of your hundreds of books and flipped to Cow’s Skull: Red, White, and Blue.The skull more like a tattered shirt than solid bone. My fingertips made their way down to where there would have been jowl-heat, where its nostrils would have heaved wet, now turned ratty bone. Womb-shaped head, I thought, complete with horns, shredded womb. I assumed that was what I looked like inside. That hostile and ungiving.

On the next page, Cow’s Skull with Calico Roses. Big white plastic flowers on the has-been head. One rose at the wide brow, one stubbing out the frayed snout below. The roses were fake, the ones that had modeled for her still life, like the ones decorating the Snyder’s Crossing Cemetery on Memorial Day or the ones beside porch steps in Caudell, speared into the ground with the Fourth of July pinwheels moving slack year-round. O’Keeffe saw drought take the animals down, skeletons everywhere. Graves on top of the blasted earth and nothing to exhume. Death bald-faced.

“Let’s go there,” Mave had said, thinking, I knew, about your vaster desert sojourns. This would be as close as she would ever get.

And I said okay because she and I both needed to go but felt ourselves aimless. I said okay because it seemed to me the desert is where you go when you’ve got nowhere else to go. Skin to leather by the sun, stick to witch for water, mind to clarify, more silence than not. We would have space to figure it all out. But it was not supposed to be the end.

I studied Mave’s profile in glimpses, then back to the road. Her body—what did it mean? How could it ever not be beside mine?

She was thinking of you, you like the deepest itch, perhaps telling you the plan, what she would do under the desert night sky outside some motel when Nan and I would go out for Chinese at a Double Dragon.

SINCE I DID NOT SMOKE IN LOTTIE’S HOUSE, I SMOKED IN MY OWN. The morning of the September LaFaber co-op meeting, I sat at the empty rough-lumber table to smoke and think. I had invited Liza, widowed and now moved in with her mother. The scrubbed half-dozen butternuts waited in a five-gallon bucket on the floor. It’s possible, I think, to be held by a house. The cheap paneling, the brick- patterned linoleum, the hushed repository of the upstairs bedrooms.

Outside, at Mave’s, a high-pitched idling pealed out. A belt of some sort went bad and snapped, then a potent explosion of car engine followed by her froth of swearing. I looked out the kitchen window to find her ancient brown Pontiac belching smoke in the middle of her driveway. She had spilled a feed sack of black walnuts gathered from her tree into the driveway ruts for the car to run over and crush, to expedite the shelling process. She did this every fall, crushed the black walnuts sheathed in their bruised green hulls and pungent, but she never finished the tedious project. Mave pounded the hood, crumpled the empty feed sack, marched up the driveway to her school bus parked on a tilt and kicked the tires.

I stepped out to the porch to witness Mave’s fit through our path that needed clearing. She batted smoke from her face and disappeared into the house and came back with a can of primer and a brush. She painted Farm Use across the passenger door and fender. Drunk early. I tried not to laugh, yelling, “Let me call Rex.”

She ranted on, now about both the shitbox car and Rex.

If she could crush the walnuts she could shell a jarful to have something to trade with the other co-op women. Last meeting, she’d brought key chains from the service station and a grommeted banner with pilgrims on it to hang at Thanksgiving, and the women had been reluctant to trade a pound of newly dug red potatoes for a trinket. Mave got the hood up, and I lost her head and denim garb to the smoke.

I didn’t call Rex; I’d forgotten the phone was disconnected. I went down to the cellar, left the light off so there was only the moted sun coming through the thin windows at the house’s foundation, windows through which one could watch the world in secret. I still had three-quarters of a self stowed in this house, and three-quarters of my preserves. The cellar was walled in but not finished—the door without a knob or latch I kept shut with a brick at its base, only one side of shelving installed. The potato bin in the corner had never been enclosed, and its mustiness gritted the cellar air. I listened in the dark for Ellis padding after me with claws ticking on the floor, needing to be trimmed, but he was at the other home, the other life. It felt good to naturally miss his barrel body and his eyes like woman’s eyes.

I pulled the light bulb’s cord to survey the jars of unbright peaches, beans, Romas. They had taken in the summer sun and settled it down to a muted mature color for winter’s duration. I chose a quart of half-runner beans for the co-op crate, a quart of peaches, some pickles, one pint of beets I could part with, and two pints of kraut, Liza’s favorite. I hoped Liza would come—on the phone she had said she would bring some of her mother’s raw honeycomb, voice hoarse and quiet and black. She had been back for a few months, but I’d hardly seen her, she always made excuses. I propped the full crate onto my hipbone and left the cellar dark, nudged the brick jam back into place with my foot.

I thought about Liza’s industrious hands; it was she and her mother who had taught me to can with a boil-bath canner. Miranda had helped, too, on scattered brief afternoons when